Fee, Gordon

ORAL HISTORY OF GORDON FEE
Interviewed by Keith McDaniel
April 29, 2012
MR. MCDANIEL: This is Keith McDaniel, and today is April 19, 2012, and I am at the home of Mr. Gordon Fee. Gordon, thanks for taking the time to talk to us.
MR. FEE: Glad to do it.
MR. MCDANIEL: Let's start at the very beginning. Why don't you tell me where you were born and raised and something about your family and where you went to school?
MR. FEE: Okay. That's a pretty simple question. I was born in New York State, but we only stayed there for a very short period of time and went back to my father's hometown of Canonsburg, Pennsylvania. My wife always laughs when I say it's the home of Perry Como, Bobby Vinton, and me, down there. But I grew up and spent most of my life in that small town, about 17 miles to the west of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. And my father was in the newspaper business for a number of years, until World War II came along, and he was called up, or volunteered; I guess, to be truthful, he volunteered to go to World War II. And we stayed home while he went to Germany and fought in that war. And then afterwards he returns to Canonsburg. I did all of my schooling there, graduated from Canonsburg High School in 1952. And my physics teacher at that time said there was only one career that I should consider and only one school that I should consider, so I became a physics major at Penn State. And I went off in 1952 and ultimately graduated with a BS in physics from Penn State in 1956.
MR. MCDANIEL: Now how old was your father when he went in the war?
MR. FEE: My father was born in '09 and he went in in '41, so --
MR. MCDANIEL: He was 32.
MR. FEE: Thirty-two years old at that time.
MR. MCDANIEL : And they were taking those fellows then, weren't they?
MR. FEE: Yeah, and he was -- he had never graduated from high school, but he was certainly a leader and was identified very early on, sent to officer's training school, and ultimately only stayed out of the military about three years after the war, was called back up for Korea, and stayed in.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, did he?
MR. FEE: So I became an Army brat and was lucky enough to move around the countryside, as they did, from one military post to another, whether it be Fort Belvoir, Virginia, where I spent some of my time between college, or Europe; I got to go to Germany, because I was going home for the summer for my freshman and sophomore year in college. So my dream at Penn State was to my follow my father's footsteps and become a military officer and go into the military for good, and in my senior year at Penn State I was to be commissioned. I was the cadet commander at Penn State, led all of the ROTC troops there, and was given a regular Army commission with one exception, because I was going to be regular Army I had to take one more physical, and lo and behold, I failed it.
MR. MCDANIEL: You did?
MR. FEE: And they had taken us off on a Saturday morning to Carlisle, Pennsylvania, a big military hospital. And just before noon on that day they announced that we were running late and the cardiologist had a tee time at 1:00, and so we're going to double-time you to the heart doctor. In which they did, and he took one listen and said, "You have a murmur. You're out." And literally in 30 seconds my career went up in smoke.
MR. MCDANIEL: Wow.
MR. FEE: And I became suddenly eligible for the draft in 1956 in there, but it was too late to change over to even get a cap and gown, so I graduated in uniform, but was never commissioned.
MR. MCDANIEL: Never commissioned.
MR. FEE: And suddenly I had no job, and I went out and --
MR. MCDANIEL: And this is what, '56?
MR. FEE: 1956. And I began interviewing as a junior physicist, and accepted a job. I was in love and had been lucky enough at that time with my current wife, became my fiancé, and we were engaged. And she, frankly, thought this was a pretty good thing, because she was not looking forward to being a military wife at all.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. FEE: And so we accepted a job to go to work for Pittsburgh Plate Glass in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, her hometown.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh. Did you meet her at Penn State?
MR. FEE: Met her as Penn State as a blind date, and we were married at Penn State in the Eisenhower Chapel, because Milton Eisenhower, Ike's brother, was President of Penn State when we were there, and they named the chapel for him. And we were married -- we were the second marriage at the chapel at Penn State. But suddenly we have no job, but we find one very quickly and we're all set to go to Pittsburgh, when I see on this bulletin board that they were asking folks to come and interview in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. I'd never been out of the state of Pennsylvania going south, and I thought, "I don't have anything to do that particular week. Let's go to Tennessee" and I did. And as you and I said before we turned on the camera, it was kind of interesting because it was April 19, 1956 that I was here for an interview and met and became lifetime friends, I guess you might say, with my mentor and friend in Bill Wilcox.
MR. MCDANIEL: Wow.
MR. FEE: Bill was the Technical Director for the Gaseous Diffusion Plant. He worked for a Vice President by the name of Paul Vanstrum, and I was fortunate enough on that interview trip to not only interview with Bill Wilcox, but with the Vice President; went to lunch with Paul Vanstrum. And the two of them offered me a job at the end of that particular interview. There wasn't any discussion of going home; they said, "We'd like you to come to Tennessee." And I loved the place down here, so I can remember very distinctly getting off the airplane in State College, Pennsylvania, and Miriam met me and I was all aglow, saying, "Guess what; we're going to Tennessee," and her response was, "You are going where?"
MR. MCDANIEL: Because she was going home, wasn't she?
MR. FEE: She was going home to Pittsburgh.
MR. MCDANIEL: She was going home.
MR. FEE: But after some discussion, and we were not married at that time, we were only engaged, and her mother was not happy, her daddy was not happy, but we came down and looked. She brought her father along and looked. But I was sold.
MR. MCDANIEL: You were sold.
MR. FEE: Absolutely sold. And I think back on that interview, because Mr. Vanstrum reminded me of that interview for 40 years ago, because of one statement I made. And when I reflect back on it, I don't know why he hired me, because I must've been feeling pretty arrogant, because he asked me what was my career desire, and I said to take his job. And when I ultimately did become vice president and take his job he said, "Well, you finally made it, and here's the keys to the office" in there. But I was taken, and on July 7, 1956 came to work here in a program at that time where they hired you in at the K-25 site, but didn't assign you to any particular job; they rotated you for a year, six weeks at a crack, through each of a set of different departments. And that sort of set a real career path for me in that I look back at it now and I see what I really did for my career with -- which ultimately lasted some 40 hour -- 40 hours; 40 years or so.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right. Right.
MR. FEE: Was to move from one place to another and never stayed too long in any one particular assignment or one job.
MR. MCDANIEL: Now, why did they do that, the six weeks for a year? Was it just to see what you were good at or to see how you might fit into the --
MR. FEE: I think both; to make sure that they understood what your capabilities were, and that they could see how you might match up to their technical needs in there. So I started out in the world of barrier at K-25 on the midnight shift.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. Oh, is that right?
MR. FEE: And working in the pilot plant. And very quickly decided that I needed more schooling. And so in that era, the University of Tennessee ran a full-blown night school in Oak Ridge. In the yellow buildings there behind the Department of Energy headquarters today, they ran a night school where you could get a technical degree or a degree in management. I elected to start with an objective of getting a degree in, Master’s Degree in Nuclear Engineering. I figure if I'm in Oak Ridge, it's nuclear, I ought to get more knowledge in the area of nuclear engineering, and so I began going to night school. The first fall I was here, I wasn't quite married there; we were -- we married on December 15, 1956. So I had been to work here six months because Miriam's dad said we could not get married until we had $750.00 in the bank. Boy, when you think about that today --
MR. MCDANIEL: That was a lot of money, though, back in '56.
MR. FEE: That was a lot of money in that era. And so it took me that six months to get that amount of money. But yeah, they wanted to see what your capabilities were, and so as I said, I started out on the midnight shift, working in the barrier pilot plant, testing various new modes of barrier. Moved on to the Mechanical Engineering Department under a fellow by the name of Harold Culpepper, and began working on testing of compressors. As you know, in the Gaseous Diffusion Process you pump lots of gas around over and over and over again, and the more efficient the compressors are the better off your plant is going to be and the less electricity you're going to consume in doing that job.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. FEE: And so they gave me the job of constructing a major test facility for compressors and compressor blades. And we had to build the facility. And at that time all of that work was done for the Atomic Energy Commission, the predecessor of DOE. And they did all that work up at their research laboratory in Cleveland, Ohio. And lo and behold, along about, I guess it was 1958 -- my mind gets a little bit muddled on dates these days -- when Sputnik went up, and the next day they called out here and said to the K-25 managers that they no longer would do any work for other agencies; they were going deep into the space business quickly, come get the stuff.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, really?
MR. FEE: And so I was dispatched to Louis Field up in Cleveland, Ohio, was given a boxcar, literally a railroad boxcar, and we loaded as fast as we could all of the test equipment that they had been doing on compressors. And it wasn't called NASA in those days; it was a predecessor agency, and I've forgotten what it was.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. FEE: But we loaded everything up over a period of about ten days, didn't have time to match it to drawings, to anything, and brought it down into these big buildings at the diffusion plant, laid all that stuff out over the floor, and tried to match it to drawings, and what was this piece and that piece. But that ended up with establishing a real test facility for that particular entity. And I did that for about a year in there, before that job was stable enough. In the meantime, as I said, I was going to night school all the time, and ultimately graduated in 1962 at the University of Tennessee with a Master’s degree in nuclear engineering. Well, when you get a degree, you've obviously got to move on, and so I began looking for a job outside of Oak Ridge and looking around the countryside, but only interviewing on weekends, because I didn't want to jeopardize my job.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. FEE: But ultimately found a job that we thought we'd like, to move to San Diego, California and work for General Atomic in the reactor business. And when I announced to Mr. Wilcox that I was going to go, he said, "Let's talk to Vanstrum." And we did, and he said, "Well, I can see why you might feel that you want to move on." K-25 was laying off people in 1962, when I got my degree.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. FEE: And, but he said, "Let me see if I can find you a job with Union Carbide." All of us worked for Union Carbide’s Nuclear Division at that time.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. FEE: And they were headquartered in New York, and some Oak Ridgers had gone on to bigger jobs with Union Carbide, in particular an Associate Director of Oak Ridge National Laboratory by the name of Bob Sharpie, was a Vice President in the New York office, and they contacted him, and he said, "Well, I'm all booked up, but I'll do it on Saturday morning if he can be here at 7:00 in New York City," tomorrow morning.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh wow.
MR. FEE: And so I hustled; they got me a plane ticket, and next thing I knew, at 7:00 in the morning, I was in New York City at the Union Carbide headquarters building, talking to a guy that I had never heard of in my life.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. FEE: At 8:00 I accepted a job with him to go to work in Cleveland, Ohio, on a project having nothing to do with nuclear. And I guess it tells something about me, because if Bob Sharpie walked in here today and probably told me to go out and stand in the middle of the road out here, I'd probably go do it. He was a very charismatic type; went on to become Chairman of the Board and President of Bell & Howell.
MR. MCDANIEL: Wow.
MR. FEE: But he talked me into, based on the recommendation that he got from Oak Ridge, to going to Cleveland to be Engineering Manager for what is becoming somewhat popular today, and that's fuel cells.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right?
MR. FEE: Union Carbide at that time, 1962, held every patent of any substance for fuel cells.
MR. MCDANIEL: Now, how old were you when you accepted this? So that was '62?
MR. FEE: I was born in '34, and so --
MR. MCDANIEL: You were 28.
MR. FEE: Twenty-eight, right. I was 28 years old. And we go to Cleveland, and I can always remember having to do a little bit of arm-twisting. We had two small children by then, and I'm doing a little bit of arm-twisting because my wife was all convinced that, again, she'd been had, because --
MR. MCDANIEL: She'd been hoodwinked, hadn't she?
MR. FEE: -- she wanted to go to California and see what the life was on the beach in California, and here I am, trying to convince her that the beach in California was okay, but the one in Ohio on Lake Erie would be neat; we'd live right near the lake.
MR. MCDANIEL: Mm-hmm. Sure.
MR. FEE: So in May of 1962 we get to Cleveland, we decide our first weekend that she's there, "Let's go to the lake."
MR. MCDANIEL: Mm-hmm. In May.
MR. FEE: In May. And she said, "Well, the first thing I've got to do is find the snowsuits for the kids, because it is cold and blowy." We get to the lake and there are gigantic signs everywhere that the E. coli content is too high, stay off the beach.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh my goodness.
MR. FEE: And as a consequence, we were introduced to Cleveland in an interesting, interesting fashion there.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh my.
MR. FEE: But I became an Engineering Director, and Union Carbide at that time, as I said, held all the major patents for fuel cells, something that is coming back alive today. But at that time Union Carbide's only significant government operation was Oak Ridge, Tennessee or selling D-sized flashlight batteries to the U.S. Army. They did not believe in working for the U.S. Government.
MR. MCDANIEL: Really?
MR. FEE: And therefore, when they were approached by NASA, whatever the predecessor organization was, to undertake fuel cells for space, which has been the only real use of the fuel cell technology, they said no. They would release some of their patent technology to other people, but they were not interested in working for the government on space.
MR. MCDANIEL: Wow.
MR. FEE: They learned to regret that, because as the fuel cell world went, there was no commercial market. And they ultimately would've liked to have had some, but a little late. But Mr. Sharpie intervenes again in my life, because along about 1965, and I don't remember the exact year here, but along about October Mr. Sharpie shows up, and our boss at that time was another former associate director of Oak Ridge National Laboratory, by the name of Dr. Charlie Winters, headed up the fuel cell project for Union Carbide. And Sharpie showed up one day and called us all into the auditorium and they said, "We just signed a contract with General Motors. There's a big electric vehicle show in January for Congress on electric vehicles. General Motors has selected us to build a fuel cell hydrogen-powered truck to show at this show, and we have some, what, three months to do this. And it has to be 30 kilowatts," and about the biggest we had ever built was 300 watts.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. FEE: He called for other help to come up from Oak Ridge, because that's -- all the leaders were from there. And we go all out, 24 hours a day. General Motors did things, and this became, I didn't realize until two years ago, this was the first fuel cell-powered vehicle in the world.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. FEE: And General Motors did it really big-time; they pulled a brand new Chevy van, one of these box vans like you see florists using, off the line, and literally tore it down piece-by-piece and laid it out, and then rebuilt it back up with our power supply in it. And our power supply took up the entire back of the van; you couldn't haul another thing in it.
MR. MCDANIEL: I'm sure.
MR. FEE: With a hydrogen cylinder for hydrogen fuel and an oxygen cylinder, so you're driving down the road with hydrogen and oxygen.
MR. MCDANIEL: Best not wreck.
MR. FEE: We are ready on about January, early January to test it. We're all at the dynamometer in Detroit. And one of the things, that you have to have coolant, and the coolant was 550 gallons of potassium hydroxide, a chemical. And so they go down through the checklist, and they eventually roll in ten 55-gallon drums of potassium hydroxide, pour them in. Somebody along the line says, calls for power, and they call for five-percent power. And lo and behold, a wheel starts to turn on the back on the dynamometer. And then suddenly we see a little whiff of smoke out from underneath the vehicle. The next thing we know, we are all running, because there is liquid running out of the bottom of this vehicle. All 550 gallons come out on the floor. Subsequently, to find out that one of the drums wasn't potassium hydroxide; it was trichloroethylene, a solvent; it had dissolved all the plastic and the hydrogen-oxygen came together and we had a fire.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, gosh.
MR. FEE: And General Motors says, "Well, we're not going to make that show, but let's do it again." And so we do, but the second time around they didn't have a show for Congress, but they had a big show in Detroit and they drove this thing about here to the street, maybe 50 yards. The driver got out, threw the keys into the crowd, and they loaded it on an 18-wheeler, took it to six automobile shows around the country, stopped in Washington, D.C., donated it to the Smithsonian, where it is today, took a $6 million tax write-off, and said, "That's the end of fuel cells." And until this day, here we are, some zillion years later, and the technology just wasn't there; the physics wasn't there.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. FEE: So very shortly thereafter, on that episode, Union Carbide decided there was not any market for fuel cells, and we suddenly were on the market to close down the project and move on to other jobs. And here I am, looking for a job again. I ended up in another interesting career with Union Carbide at White Plains, New York. I became Marketing Manager for Union Carbide Environmental Instruments. And our number one instrument that we sold was a dissolved oxygen meter that was used in sewage treatment plants.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, really?
MR. FEE: So about as far from nuclear as you could possibly imagine.
MR. MCDANIEL: That's true.
MR. FEE: And I began traveling across the United States, touring sewage treatment plants. And there's nothing in your life more interesting than standing on top of a sewage treatment plant in the hot sun in July in Nashville, Tennessee, trying to figure out why your product doesn't work.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. FEE: But we developed that business over several years, from about 1969 to 1972, and got it in such a state that the business was attractive enough, it was sold, and was sold off to people that were in the instrument business. And so suddenly in 1972, after living three great years in White Plains, New York, we're back looking for a job. And Union Carbide offered us a job in Buffalo, New York. And it was October, and as we're leaving the driveway to go look for -- see whether my wife and family would like to live in Buffalo, we got about an hour away and she said, "I forgot to bring the boots for the kids." And I said, "If there's snow in October in Buffalo, New York, we ain't going there." So, well, we ended up wrapping the kids' feet in plastic, because there was snow.
MR. MCDANIEL: There was snow.
MR. FEE: And so coming back on the New York Turnpike on a Sunday night, I'm on the phone from one of the turnpike stands, talking to who else, but Bill Wilcox, saying, "What's the prospect of coming back to Oak Ridge?"
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. FEE: And he went and got on the phone with Mr. Vanstrum, and the next thing I know, we had a job offer to come back to Oak Ridge. So in 1972 we transferred back and have been here ever since.
MR. MCDANIEL: So you were gone, what, about ten years?
MR. FEE: About ten years.
MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah.
MR. FEE: And, of course, we came back working for Union Carbide, so all my company service kept in place there.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. Sure.
MR. FEE: My wife did not want to come back to Oak Ridge.
MR. MCDANIEL: Really?
MR. FEE: Couldn't get her out of here now, but her sort of thing was we'd done that gig. But once we came back and we were young then still and became very active in Oak Ridge Playhouse, and she did behind-the-scenes and I was on the stage, and we had kids growing up.
MR. MCDANIEL: What did you do at the Playhouse? What were some of the plays?
MR. FEE: I did -- well, I did, I guess my most famous role was in 12 Angry Men.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, really?
MR. FEE: I did that one. Did two Shakespeare shows. And I guess one of the leads was in a play called Indians. And it was a unique play in that we had three different Division Directors. By that time I had gone on to become a Division Director at ORNL. We had three different Division Directors playing Indians.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. FEE: And I played Sitting Bull, and you do a dance in that particular play where you put these steel hooks, simulated, through your chest and you dance around the Maypole, hung back on this thing in there. So had a lot of fun doing plays. And of course, you and I both know Paul Ebert. We became extremely good friends with Paul. All this occurred mostly before we left in '62.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right? Okay.
MR. FEE: So that when we come back we knew them, and they were one of the first people. In all fairness, Marguerite Ebert, we had a young boy, David, who was very, very shy, and we asked her to put him in a play. And he did go into a play with Marguerite.
MR. MCDANIEL: Because she was running the Junior Playhouse.
MR. FEE: She's running the Junior Playhouse.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. FEE: And he played a little rabbit or something in the first play. And during the course of the second play he was in for her, backstage there was a young magician, Mark Young from Oak Ridge here, and he began teaching our son magic. And that, for all, it seems funny now, but that became his profession.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. FEE: And he became a professional magician as a result of Oak Ridge Playhouse and Marguerite in there, and got started, and now is a very successful businessman in the entertainment field.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. FEE: So we come back to Oak Ridge in 1972, and we came back with the job that I was leading at that time, a highly, highly classified project that was designed to take centrifuges and separate plutonium. Since been declassified, but was highly classified at that time. We did all the secret passwords and all that good stuff.
MR. MCDANIEL: Now, where was that work being done?
MR. FEE: It was at K-25. We had to build a building, so I was the Project Manager, and built a building in the middle of the current K-25 building. The last building that is going to stand at K-25 is my building.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. FEE: K-1600 stands in the middle of the old U.
MR. MCDANIEL: In the middle of the old U.
MR. FEE: And we built that; today it's being used to test centrifuges for the plant up at Paducah, the one that's trying to go online right now. But we tried to hide the fact that it was a centrifuge building by moving it to a different area of the plant and putting windows in it. When you go out there next time, look at the building and you'll see all these windows in it.
MR. MCDANIEL: Really?
MR. FEE: Which are up at the top where there is no offices. And we were worried about satellites and all that good stuff.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, sure. Sure.
MR. FEE: But we were working a lot with E.I. DuPont people.
MR. MCDANIEL: Now let me ask you a question; the centrifuge technology in the early '70’s, was that -- I mean was that being developed, or had it already been developed at K-25?
MR. FEE: Just starting with development.
MR. MCDANIEL: Just starting, sure.
MR. FEE: But this is now '73.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right. Right.
MR. FEE: I think the centrifuge work, and we'd need Wilcox on this, but I think the centrifuge work starts about '68 at the University of Virginia. By the time we get into this business, it's relatively big machines, and so it had been matured a little bit in there. But all of the real work on the plant that was to be built would be at Savannah River, and so we worked a lot with E.I. DuPont people in there. And ultimately, even though it looked practical, whatever the mission was, which I never knew; we never knew what the product was going to be used for, it went away.
MR. MCDANIEL: Did it?
MR. FEE: And the project was terminated just a little bit after I was pulled out. I was pulled out, again, my career was sort of orchestrated by Vanstrum and Wilcox, and it became very obvious that the Reactor Division Director at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, a very famous Arrow gentleman, and one that I hope that somebody is talking to about Weinberg, just dawned on me, was a guy by the name of Beall. And his son is very famous because his son started Ruby Tuesdays, the restaurant.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right?
MR. FEE: And Sam Beall was division director, and he retired to help his son in the restaurant business.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right. Yeah, he's on my list. He's on my list for sure.
MR. FEE: Yeah, he's still alive; I've ran into him and he's --
MR. MCDANIEL: Does he live in Maryville?
MR. FEE: Yes.
MR. MCDANIEL: That's what I was thinking, he lives in Maryville.
MR. FEE: Yep, he lives in Maryville.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. FEE: And so he announced he was going to retire as Division Director of the Reactor Division, and I had diverse experience, and lucky enough, they told Herman Postma, the Director of the Laboratory, that I would be a good candidate. And so they put me over there to work for a year under Sam's tutorage and to run for the Laboratory all of the safety programs associated with reactor safety. In the '70s, '75 and on it was a very -- we were aggressively in this country addressing nuclear power, but there was still an awful lot of concern and public questioning about the safety of nuclear power.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. FEE: So I took on the challenge of coordinating and being the Project Manager for all of the programs at Oak Ridge National Laboratory that were being sponsored and paid for by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. So I would travel every two weeks to Washington to talk to the Nuclear Regulatory folks, and had interfaced with a lot of great scientists at ORNL who were working on the safety of the vessel that goes around it and on new fuel for reactors, etc. And then sort of as a sidelight, three of us went on the road, around the Southeast primarily, talking about the safety of nuclear power and why TVA’s plants would be safe. And one of the three of us was a gentleman by the name of Jack Gibbons, and Jack went on to become Science Coordinator for the United States for President Clinton, I believe.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right?
MR. FEE: And the other one was a gentleman I think you've probably run into, by the name of Bill Bibb, who worked for the Atomic Energy Commission, and we sort of came at it from different perspectives.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. FEE: And so after a year of being the Project Director for Nuclear Safety Programs, Sam Beall retires and I became the Division Director for the Reactor Division of Oak Ridge National Laboratory. So now I've worked at two of the plants, and under that just expanded my role and interest in the whole reactor field. But suddenly --
MR. MCDANIEL: And Union Carbide was still running the entire thing?
MR. FEE: Union Carbide is still running it, yep. This is late '70s now.
MR. MCDANIEL: Mm-hmm. Sure.
MR. FEE: And suddenly, you remember we started the '88, when we started standing in line for gas and we had the famous energy crisis and we couldn't burn lights at night?
MR. MCDANIEL: Yes. Sure.
MR. FEE: And the word came down from Washington, I'd love to know who in the history, that the Laboratory would no longer have a Reactor Division.
MR. MCDANIEL: Really?
MR. FEE: It was not popular and we needed to -- and so I was given the challenge of renaming the division. And so like it or not over there, I named it the Engineering Technology Division. And we had had another hiccup when it came to name in that timeframe; a famous congressman by the name of Holifield, somehow his colleagues wanted to honor him, and one midnight they renamed the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Holifield National Laboratory. And the Director, Herman Postma, went berserk, as we all did, and it took about six weeks or six months, I don't remember, it may have been six months, to get the name changed back and to name the accelerator out there the Holifield Accelerator. So, there were lots of name things going on.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. Sure. You know what would be valuable now, is some letterhead from the Holifield National Laboratory.
MR. FEE: It is. And the only two things that Herman would do under the name change was have letterheads printed up. And you're right, it would be very valuable. And they changed the sign. One sign he would -- had to agree to change the sign on the highway.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. FEE: But everything else, scientific papers, you -- I challenge anybody to find a scientific paper that says "Holifield" on it, because it was Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and he felt very strongly. But I spent several great years at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, but the actual division itself was located at Y-12, because long, long before my time Oak Ridge National Laboratory ran out of space. And so for years they had three of their major divisions were located at the Y-12 site, away from the main laboratory. And we had Engineering Technology, Fusion Energy, and Biology. And so in that role, I became very knowledgeable of a number of the Y-12 folks, because they did all of our maintenance and support activities, because we were on their real estate.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. FEE: And so it seems like that in all my career shifts around, I would be called into the boss's office and said, "Gee, we think you ought to go here or there. Do you think you could be there?" And when I went to the Reactor Division I had -- I was working, as I said, in another job. And the fact is, I jumped over a job. Gosh, that's funny, because I was thinking about it earlier this morning; I jumped over a job; they pulled me out of the Reactor Division to head up a thing called the Operating Contractors Project Office. The Operating Contractor's Project Office was put in place in about 1978 by Vanstrum to support the country's decision to build a major new diffusion plant -- not a diffusion plant; a new enrichment plant at Portsmouth, Ohio, using centrifuge technology.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. FEE: And there were going to be three major contractors involved in that; Goodyear, who was scheduled to ultimately run the plant; Union Carbide, who was going to do all of the development work here at Oak Ridge; and Air Research, who was going to do a lot of the basic production centrifuge work in California. And the Department of Energy, a fellow by the name of Percy Brewington, happens to live one block down from here right now, asked Union Carbide to establish an office staffed with people from all three different contractors, who would help the government engineer and get contracts to build that plan up in Portsmouth, which was scheduled to be a $2 billion investment. And so I was asked to head that up, and I had three Vice Presidents, one from Union Carbide, and one from Air Research, and one from Goodyear Atomic up in Akron. And so we went to work, essentially, as an arm of the Atomic Energy Commission, by that time, I believe, were ERDA, the Energy Research and Development Administration.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. FEE: And we were located at K-25 for a while. We were located at Y-12 for a while. Whoever happened to have a building available, it seemed.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. FEE: And then Jimmy Carter became President, and one of the very first things he does was cancel that project. So, I've got a long history of starting things, and they seem to come and go in there.
MR. MCDANIEL: They got canceled.
MR. FEE: But I was already gone when he canceled that, because one Friday night I got called into Mr. Vanstrum's office, and he said that his boss, which was Roger Hibbs, and he had talked, and they thought I needed to go to the Laboratory to be head of the Nuclear Regulatory Projects, and ultimately become Division Director. Why don't I go over there Monday morning and start to work? And don't worry about my office; they'd send my stuff over. And that was sort of my history with those guys, was "Don't worry about your office. We'll get it over there."
MR. MCDANIEL: "We'll get it to you."
MR. FEE: So, the next Monday I went over, walked into Sam Beall's office, and became Reactor Division Director, ultimately a year later in there. And the same thing -- what got me to remember that was basically the same thing happened in 1982. In 1982, I got called to Mr. Vanstrum's office and he said, "We know that in a year Jack Case is going to retire as Plant Manager of the Y-12 plant. You're our pick if you can learn to live in the weapons business, because it's a family. So, we want you to come over Monday." This was Friday night again.
MR. MCDANIEL: Of course.
MR. FEE: Always Friday night. "But I want you to think about it, because this is a serious -- if you can't make the grade it may be a serious hiccup."
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. FEE: And so that Friday night, I spent in the backyard of Bill Wilcox’s, sitting on his swing, talking about this career opportunity. I knew I wasn't going to turn him down. I mean, I wasn't going to turn my boss down if he wanted me to go do it. But that Monday morning, I went to work and suddenly was in the middle of the -- they moved me to Y-12 as head of -- I don't think it was called a division; I think we were the Department of Project Engineering. And had a lot of long-term Y-12ers who didn't think too much of a guy that came from Oak Ridge National Laboratory. You know, the production folks and the research folks never quite see eye-to-eye on things.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. Exactly.
MR. FEE: And so, here comes this invader in there. It had not been announced and wouldn't be announced for some time that I --
MR. MCDANIEL: Let me stop you for a second. You said you went over to Wilcox's house and sat -- what did Bill tell you?
MR. FEE: Bill told me, “Do what your heart says. Don't listen to anybody else, but you.” And he said, "You know how well you're thought of, but you've got to make your own career decisions there." That's what he told me.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. Sure.
MR. FEE: And which, he'd told me every other time also.
MR. MCDANIEL: But he -- but you'd known him for a long time, and he had a lot of confidence in your ability to do that.
MR. FEE: And I guess he sort of became -- well, he has been for 50 years, been my mentor. And it's sort of such an interesting thing. Bill, as you and I both know him very well, and you know how precise he is.
MR. MCDANIEL: Mm-hmm.
MR. FEE: And I guess I'd be amiss if I didn't tell my first Wilcox story, because --
MR. MCDANIEL: I was going to ask you about that. Tell me that, please.
MR. FEE: We come to work here on July 7, 19__. I say "we," because I was put into a room and locked up because I didn't have a clearance.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. FEE: And so, they literally locked you in a room. And my roommate for six weeks at work was a fellow by the name of Ed Woy. Ed's deceased now, but he also didn't have a clearance. I didn't know him, he didn't know me, but the rumor goes over the plant that there are two Chinamen up in the ad building; Woy and Fee are locked in there. And they gave us a job, we didn't have any clearance, of they brought in -- Mr. Wilcox brought in a zillion tubes about this long, about that round, that had been in tests in cooling towers, to see if they were corroding or not. And our job was to take a brush, ram it through there, collect all the stuff in a little bottle, put the bottle on a scale, and weigh it and plot the data. And so, we worked for two or three weeks doing this, eight hours a day.
MR. MCDANIEL: Wow.
MR. FEE: Plot.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. FEE: And of course, we wanted to be neat, you know? So, we plot all these things. And we probably plotted 60-70 of these graphs. Not allowed to know what they are, so it's weight versus sample number, or something of this like. And anytime you wanted to go to the restroom, you go to the door and knock on the door, and wave at the secretary and she would escort you down.
MR. MCDANIEL: Wow.
MR. FEE: And Mr. Wilcox would come over twice a day and check on the progress, and see how you're doing. And it ultimately comes time to deliver the graphs, and we're all proud. And to this day I can see it; we lay the graphs down, he picks up the first one and he says, "What a bunch of crap!" He says, "Don't you Yankee boys know anything about plotting graphs?" Well first, Mr. Woy wasn't a Yankee; he was from Virginia and South Carolina and Tennessee. And secondly, we didn't know what he was talking about.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. FEE: And we're shocked, and he says, "You know, you never, ever use the margin. The margin is not -- it's where you bind the thing. You put your line inside the thing. Do them over." And I told Bill that in the hospital here about six weeks ago, and he says, "You won't forget that story, will you?" and I said, "No, I won't." Because Bill was so precise, and you know, always he had his red pen. You'd give him a paper and you'd sweat because you knew it was going to come back with every -- and although we tell it sort of as a funny story now, in reality, I told my grandson, and I told Bill this sitting there in the hospital with him, it set a tone that I probably have lived with, that you're going to do it, you do it right, and you do it to the best of your ability, and if it isn't right you fix it. But you don't take shortcuts on things. And now today, it seems -- I still have a terribly difficult time when Bill, as he did just two days ago, he sends me these ballyhoos that we're working on for the history, and he says, "Mark them up." I have a hard time marking up Bill Wilcox's stuff; I really do.
MR. MCDANIEL: I'm sure.
MR. FEE: Anyway, to go on, I come back to Y-12 as a department head, and began going to Albuquerque, because in that era, 1982, the weapons business was fully run and coordinated by the Department of Energy's office in Albuquerque, New Mexico. And Oak Ridge had very, very little to do with the weapons business. They did some of the housekeeping with the contract. And I can remember they used to have, every quarter all the plant managers, and there were seven from around the countryside, of different parts of the weapons component, would be called, and we'd have a plant managers meeting in Albuquerque or at one of the plants. And the first one I went to with Mr. Case was in Albuquerque, and a gentleman named Herb Roser had the head job for Albuquerque for the Department of Energy. And we met with him before going into the big meeting, and I can remember him giving a lecture to us about the fact that I was coming into a weapons family and that he operated the business as a family; there was no differentiation between the government workers and the contractors, our job was to make sure the country had the right nuclear weapon defense systems in place and that we worked together to make that happen and to expend the taxpayers' money in the most efficient way possible. I think of that lecture a lot, and the fact is D. Ray Smith picked up that name from doing this thing like you're doing here at the Y-12 plant. And I told him that story on there, and that series that he's running for PBS now, he's called The Nuclear Family in there.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh yeah. Sure.
MR. FEE: And that's where he got the name, he told me, in there. So I spent a year trying to learn the business. The Y-12 is a fascinating place. If you can't get things done anywhere else in the world, you probably can get it done at Y-12. And they have such a wonderful attitude of, "We can do it no matter what it is." Sometimes my -- the people that worked, ultimately worked for me would tell me, "We can do it, just don't ask us how much it's going to cost."
MC. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. FEE: But learned from one of the great masters; Jack Case is obviously one of the foundations of the Oak Ridge complex. He was the guy that went to Los Alamos and brought the first drawings back to make the first parts that Y-12, when we converted over from being a separation plant to a machining plant.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. FEE: Proud of his heritage, that he was a machinist and carried a union card till the time he died, and really believed in the worker. And I guess that's the big lesson I learned from Jack Case, was that you're nothing without the people that work for you. And the guy -- Jack went out of his way when he retired to thank the janitor who cleaned his office.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. FEE: As well as thanking the people who were in management. But he specific -- I never forgot that; we were all out at the Elks Club for his retirement party, and he called that guy up and shook his hand and said, "You were the most important part of my office at times."
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. FEE: And that was just sort of Jack's way. So he was my mentor, you might say. Wilcox was the technical director, so I got the technical side from Bill, and the plant operations side from Jack Case. So it was a great year, and Jack retired then in '82-'83, and I became plant manager and had a great run of nine years through a pretty interesting time. In the front end of that period at Y-12 we were in a period of full-born production. We were fighting the Cold War by building the nuclear stockpile. President Reagan obviously believed in that as a deterrent. Nobody in the plant ever believed we wanted to use one of these things, but we sure had a work ethic of getting the job done. Had some wonderful people: Jeff Bostock, George Evans, Bill Thompson; lots of great people that worked in that era. And Joe LaGrone comes to town and becomes the head of the Department of Energy. And in a lot of aspects Joe put his mark in more than one way on the plant, because some funny things began happening across the world. One of the things that happened, a very sad event, when we lost a lot of our Marines in a bombing in Beirut.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. FEE: And as those, the violence picked up across the country and the terrorist threat became real, one of the first persons in this country, I believe, that ever, ever began to pay attention to it was Joe LaGrone. And he began coming out and looking and studying with us and talking about the fact that we had some vulnerabilities; that we were the stockpile for all the United States in rich uranium, and everything that was not in weapons is stored in Y-12, and therefore we might well be a target. And I had a head of security then by the name of George Evans who had grown up with the Y-12 facility, and George and I and a fellow by the name of B.B. Hopkins and Joe LaGrone would meet almost it seemed like every two or three days, sometimes in Joe's office, but more than likely he would show up at our office and say, "Let's look at this" or "Let's look at the vulnerability." And one of the first things that Joe decided, that the road beside the plant was a vulnerability from a security standpoint and it needed to be closed, and by god, we want it closed by tomorrow morning. And this happened to be Thanksgiving Eve.
MR. MCDANIEL: Now this was the Y-12 plant?
MR. FEE: This is Y-12.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right. Right. Okay.
MR. FEE: This is Y-12. I wish I could remember the era; D. Ray can, but I can't. This was about '83-'84. And all I remember, it was Christmas Eve. I mean --
MR. MCDANIEL: Thanksgiving.
MR. FEE: -- Thanksgiving Eve.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. FEE: And we had to figure out a way to close a road and put signage on it as a minimum.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. Sure.
MR. FEE: 'Cause people were using it to go up, back and forth, go to the lake or whatever. It was a thoroughfare through the reservation
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. FEE: And so -- but you never gave George Evans and B.B. Hopkins a job that they said, "You want it closed, boss? It'll be closed." And we had one sign painter, and we called him in. He had already gone home.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. FEE: We called him in and laid it out and he says, "There's no way in the world, you guys. I mean I can't get this all done." "Well, you know anybody that does?" "Not in the plant," he says, "but I've got a little business on the side, and my son does." "Where's your son?" He says, "He's playing softball for the high school over there. He's a senior in high school, but he's a great painter." We sent a guard car out to the ballpark, stopped the game, got this kid off.
MR. MCDANIEL: It probably scared him to death, didn't it?
MR. FEE: Mr. Evans put his hand on his shoulder or something and said, "Remember, you can't see anything and do anything," and we didn't take him into any classified areas; we took him into the paint shop.
MR. MCDANIEL: Of course.
MR. FEE: And the two of them painted signs, and George and I sat around and he came up with the idea, "How are we going to block this road in there? We can't just put up barriers," because the idea was to make this a secure road. I don't know how George thought about it, but he came up with the idea of taking Dempster Dumpsters and putting them full of sand.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. FEE: So we rolled Rogers out on Thanksgiving Eve to the quarry and we bought a zillion dump trucks with sand and filled them up in Dempster Dumpsters and put them on Bear Creek Road. And a fisherman showed up at 5:30, the first guy we stopped was a fisherman pulling his boat, mumbling like mad that he was going to miss the daylight coming, why were we, you know, what are we doing, you know, closing the road. But the road closed. About three weeks later the Secret Service came down from Washington to see this great idea, and the first place that they had got the assignment of stopping the traffic around the White House, and they went back, and the first thing they did was put up Dempster Dumpsters along one side of the White House, but they only kept them for a week.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. Sure.
MR. FEE: We kept them for about two months. And so the security buildup, that was one of the first big changes. So we got lots of production going on, we're going belly-out on production. Suddenly there's a threat. But again, it's only Joe that is really recognizing this. And we went on to worry about needing more guard towers and roads closed and trees cut down and internal security beefed up. But we were always about six months ahead of what was happening in Washington, and I tip my hat, that was Joe.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. FEE: And yeah, he had the name "Nervous Joe" in the agency.
MR. MCDANIEL: Did he? Mm-hmm.
MR. FEE: In there. Somewhere in that early '80 period another event that changed the whole face of the world occurs, the world as I know it at Y-12, and that was a scientist doing work out of Oak Ridge National Laboratory, published a research paper in Virginia somewhere on the mercury contamination. Mercury had been used in the Y-12 facility in the 1960s, early '60s, as a media to carry lithium, because one of the ingredients needed for a nuclear weapon, an advanced nuclear weapon, was a lithium isotope, and it had to be separated. So two gigantic buildings were built at Y-12 and filled with miles and miles and miles of piping and pumps and condensers full of mercury that were used to separate lithium. And in that era nobody knew that mercury was a -- or could be a bad actor, because all of us, if you're older than 30 or 40 years old, all your early teeth are full of mercury.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. FEE: Because instead of gold they used mercury to fill your teeth. And so everybody thought you're using it in there, so when they filled the plant, and the way they filled the plant with mercury was to build a big pig trough on top of the hill overlooking the plant down in the valley, and put a pipe down into the building. And they brought in from across the world mercury in flasks, because the only real use for mercury prior to this had been as ballasts in sea ships. And so you would have a 76, I think it is -- 71, 76 pounds, 76 pound or 76 kilogram flask, looking like one of the old canteens the military had, full of mercury, and they would use those on sailing ships down in the bottom as ballasts. And the United States brought together all this mercury to put into this plant, and they got it from the equivalent of Fort Knox, it was West Point, where the United States stored all its silver.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. FEE: And they brought it all in, and so just like the silver store, we suddenly had mercury. And they would just empty them, stand out in the open. And they thought it was funny when down in these buildings, when they got full, mercury come out of the roof. And so there was mercury -- and these tales I didn't see; Wilcox did.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. Right.
MR. FEE: Wilcox was there. But nobody worried. There wasn't any problem. It wasn't until much, much later that the Japanese discovered that mercury, which also had been used as thermometers or it had some use in electric power plants, had got into the Bay of Japan, and that as it is in the Bay it converts itself into a much more dangerous form of mercury, that the fish were eating and then ultimately dying. So you had to go from the elemental mercury, though, to a long process of converting it to another form of mercury that is then digested by fish.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. FEE: And so suddenly we are suddenly on the spotlight, though, of some of this mercury having got into the creek that goes down through Oak Ridge and ultimately out into the lake. And the whole environmental world is suddenly upon us. And there were hearings held down at the American Museum of science and Energy and there was a lot of money put into studies, and again, another name, Bill Wilcox was assigned the task of documenting all of the mercury uses in the plant to identify how much might've got away. And the very big cleanup began and we built a new retaining pond at the end of the plant. And so we're now in the mid -- beginning the mid to second half of the '80s, and so we've got a security thrust going on, an environmental cleanup beginning, and weapons begins to tailor down. The Cold War, the Wall comes down in there, and suddenly we are going from being a production to weapons coming back. Because one of the facts that not too many people understand is that in the 1960s President Eisenhower edict by an executive order that only so much of the country's enriched uranium would be used for weapons, and therefore if in fact the military comes up with a need for a new bomb, a new torpedo in there, the only way they could get one is give you back one of the old ones, and you take them all apart.
MR. MCDANIEL: I see.
MR. FEE: So Y-12 is both a production facility and a recycle facility.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, okay.
MR. FEE: When parts come back from the military they go to Amarillo, Texas, the bomb is taken apart, all the uranium parts come back to the Y-12 facility, they're melted down and reshaped and reformed, and sent back out as something else, if there is a need.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, okay.
MR. FEE: Now they come back and are put into -- the uranium is put into storage.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. FEE: And so we began converting the plant from being a production full out to much more of a recycle and storage mode as the '80s came on. And a lot of the emphasis went off then into looking at what needed to be to clean the mercury residual and any other thing that might have contaminated the facility in there. And here today, just recently the whole mercury story has began to blossom again, because each year the standards of what people think you need seem to be constantly being taken down, and what may have been acceptable ten years ago is not acceptable today in there.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. FEE: But it was a wonderful time at Y-12. In the middle of the '80s, 1986, as a result of the great work that had been done by the engineering staff, Y-12 was one of the leaders -- one of the leaders in the country of computer-aided manufacturing. And through the leadership of a guy named Mike Cuddy the plant entered and won an award from the Society of Manufacturing Engineers in 1986 as being the leading computer-aided manufacturing entity in the country. And we all got to go to Detroit to a big black tie dinner and the plant was honored. One of the few times that Y-12 was very visible, because most of the work is classified.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. FEE: It's not classified that they make parts for nuclear weapons, but exactly how they do it is the classified entity. During that era also, as the weapons business began to tailor off, or the country found itself in the need of doing things that nobody else could do, Y-12 inherited a few famous jobs, you might say.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. FEE: Before my time as plant manager probably the most famous of the Y-12 stories was they inherited the job of making the boxes that went to the moon to haul the rocks back. And they also, as a result of making those, engaged with a number of the astronauts that went to the moon. And one of the great stories is that over lunch one day one of the astronauts talked to Bill Thompson and said, "You think you could make me a special head? You're making this tool called the multipurpose tool," he said, "I have a special need tool that I want you to make for me, but there's no drawings in there." Ultimately what they made was a golf head.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. FEE: And the golf ball they hit on the moon, the head was made at Y-12, and it was designed on a napkin, according to Bill Thompson. That's a rumor story, 'cause I wasn't there.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. FEE: But I was there when we were contacted by the U.S. Navy and they were not having very good success at getting any commercial vendors to be able to make the propulsor that goes on the Sea Wolf submarine, the big, gigantic submarines that are the quietest in the world now.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. FEE: And they had the design, but they could not figure out anybody that could really make it in there. And they said, "Could you show us -- demonstrate whether or not you might have some capability in this area?" and a little test was designed. All the Navy tests for that kind of a propulsor, which is really just a big series of blades that go around, all the original prototype work and experimental work is done at Penn State University in a water tunnel on models, small models of what they need. And so they tested a particular configuration at Penn State. They took the data from that test, the Navy took it down to David Taylor Research Basin in Maryland. They modified it and looked at it, what they want, and they sent it down on a satellite over -- and this is era in the '80s, so this is pretty fancy stuff for that era.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. FEE: And they gave us the design on a Friday, and on Monday we gave them a plastic model that we had grown over the weekend out of an advanced technology where you can simulate metal shapes using a mold. And they were so convinced at the can-do attitude that the plant demonstrated, they gave us the job of making this propulsor, which was so big it was shipped out of here on a barge and went up around the -- and up to Norfolk, I guess, ultimately, and was the first Sea Wolf. And then we had to teach somebody how to do it in the private sector, because we don't compete with the private sector. But those are two of the most famous jobs I think that Y-12 has undertaken in there. So all that time was just a fabulous time because of the work ethic of the people. I mean we had 5,000 people in that era, and nobody could talk about what they really did to their families. Even to this day my son would tell you he hasn't the foggiest notion what his dad did in there.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. FEE: And so along about '92, actually it was nine years, so it's '83 to '92, I guess, running at Y-12, Herman Postma announced his retirement as executive vice president. And Clyde Hopkins was the president of the -- by that time we are now Lockheed Martin, because in 1982, the week before the World's Fair opened in Knoxville, Tennessee, we all remember that, because Union Carbide once a year would hold a dinner for us, and the president of Union Carbide and his few honchos from New York office would come down and tell us all about the wonderful world in chemicals and how great Union Carbide was. And we were all at Club Laconte the week before the World's Fair opens, in I guess April of '82.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. FEE: And just about the time the Goodyear blimp floats by the window, rehearsing for opening day of the World's Fair, the Union Carbide president comes up and says, "You guys aren't going to be interested in hearing anything about Union Carbide, because we met today on an airplane in Louisville, Kentucky, of all places, and advised the Atomic Energy Commission," or DOE, whoever we are in that era, "that we no longer want to be running any facility at Oak Ridge. We're out."
MR. MCDANIEL: Wow.
MR. FEE: And there was a silence in the room and we all said, "Oh my god, we're going to be working for Goodyear." This is -- a sign has come by, because they had Goodyear Atomic, and they ran the Portsmouth plant.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right. Right.
MR. FEE: And so we thought, "Oh my." Well, that started a very interesting period in our lives, because it takes from '82 to '84 to bid the contract and Union Carbide leaves. And ultimately the Department of Energy made a decision that everybody would be transferred to the new contractor; the bulk would go, and only 27 key managers would be up for grabs, and I was one of the key managers up for grabs, as was Clyde Hopkins and others.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. FEE: And another historical piece that we loved to get our hands around is there were many, many buttons made that said, "I'm the bulk."
MR. MCDANIEL: Really?
MR. FEE: And people wore those proudly, "I'm the bulk. I get to go and you guys, good luck in there."
MR. MCDANIEL: Good luck.
MR. FEE: So we were interviewed by all the bidders and got some nice trips. We got taken to San Diego and got courted by Air Research to their headquarters, etc. in there. And Martin Marietta courted us and took us to their laboratory, etc. And ultimately about half of us got jobs with Martin Marietta. They aren't Lockheed Martin then; they're Martin Marietta.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. FEE: And I went from being a plant manager for Union Carbide to a vice president plant manager for Martin Marietta in 1984 in there. And then in '88 or whenever they became Lockheed Martin, we all became Lockheed Martin until they ultimately decided they didn't want to bid.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. FEE: And so I become in '92 the executive vice president. At that time we had a contract for all three facilities, plus Paducah and Portsmouth, and the plant that used to be GE down at Pinellas, Clearwater, Florida, in there. It gets closed I believe sometime when I'm executive VP. Didn't have much to do with it in there. And then ultimately in '94 Clyde retired and I became president of Lockheed Martin Energy Systems. And at that time we still had all five facilities; the laboratory and Y-12, and the K-25 site had been dormant now since 1985, when it was shut down and put in cold storage, and we began the cleanup in about '90 in there. And so I became president and stayed there until April of 1997. And when I retired, it's been a long time ago now
MR. MCDANIEL: It has, hasn't it?
MR. FEE: It's been a long time ago. During my tenure as president the energy -- the fusion plants at Paducah and Portsmouth were spun off into a new private, semi-private, this -- I can't even think what they're called now, USEEC.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. FEE: Enrichment Corporation.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. Sure.
MR. FEE: That transition began. The laboratory was spun off as a separate entity. So that occurred about the last year that I was there, and it became its own little company, and it began this trend that ultimately was consummated then after I retired, and they rebid the job to break it into all these pieces of multiple contractors.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. Mm-hmm.
MR. FEE: So that's my story and I'm sticking to it.
MR. MCDANIEL: Well, that's a good story. That's a great story, MR.. So you retired in you said '97?
MR. FEE: I retired in April of 1997.
MR. MCDANIEL: '97.
MR. FEE: Right. So that's --
MR. MCDANIEL: For 40 years you were --
MR. FEE: Forty-one years.
MR. MCDANIEL: Forty-one years.
MR. FEE: Forty-one years, not quite 41.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. FEE: Yeah. And it was a great, great career and got to love Oak Ridge in there. So that's -- god, that's 15 year ago. Holy crow, that's -- yeah, it's April.
MR. MCDANIEL: Yep. Yep.
MR. FEE: Right now we're at April again of '12.
MR. MCDANIEL: Yep, April 15 years ago.
MR. FEE: It's 15 years ago. My wife would say I just changed careers, but I -- that's 15 years ago.
MR. MCDANIEL: Wow.
MR. FEE: In there.
MR. MCDANIEL: So what have you done since you retired? What do you do? You stay busy obviously.
MR. FEE: Well, yeah. During the course of my career at the plants, one of the sidelights that I ended up with beginning in 1992 -- in 1992 the president, which I guess is Clyde at that era, got a call asking for us to join the Tennessee Business Roundtable in Nashville, and I became the representative of that. And in 1994 we were just members of this organization. It's an organization of CEOs who worry about the policy of businesses from a government standpoint, a state government standpoint. And they -- I got a call from a fellow that ultimately went on to become the commissioner of finance for the State of Tennessee, Dave Goetz. He was the executive director of this thing called the Tennessee Business Roundtable, and he says to me, "Look, our education chair just retired" -- no, "just got reassigned by Tennessee Eastman to Brussels, so we can't use him anymore. Would you be my education chair for the roundtable? We'll meet once a year and we just really want to use your name." And I was dumb enough to say yes. Here we are some, what, good grief --
MR. MCDANIEL: Twenty years.
MR. FEE: That's 19 --
MR. MCDANIEL: What'd you say?
MR. FEE: That's '94. So --
MR. MCDANIEL: Eighteen years later.
MR. FEE: Here we are, 18 years later. I am still today the education chair of the Tennessee Business Roundtable. And the end of my career pretty much down there, but I have grown a passion for public education, because that's what it was all about.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. FEE: And the interaction between how business and public education, all the way from pre-K through higher education. And so I have spent hours on that endeavor, and so how does that play into the story? Well, it was announced in about December, right before Christmas of 1996, that I was going to retire.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. FEE: And because of that security buildup we were a little bit ahead of the power curve when it came to cell phones and telephones and all this, because Martin Marietta insisted that we all have radios in our company cars, and so we had radios. And so I'm driving down Interstate 40 and I get a call on the radio, which was pretty rare. I mean it was -- and it's the Commissioner of Education for the State of Tennessee, and she says, "No, you're not retiring. You're coming to work for me in there." And she, like other individuals -- I told you about Bob Sharpie and his charisma on me. Commissioner Jane Walters had about the same effect.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. FEE: And she said, "As soon as you retire I want you to come to Nashville, and we've got a federal grant for $28 million, and I think we could learn a lot from having businesspeople infused into the State Department of Education. Come to work for me." So for four years I commuted from here, sometimes three or four times a week, to Nashville, come home stupid enough to sleep here, and go back in the morning.
MR. MCDANIEL: Of course.
MR. FEE: My wife thought I was nuts. And I ran as one of the assistants in the State Department of Education as a $1.00 a year volunteer, probably the first and the last executive volunteer they ever had. And I worked for Commissioner Walter and Governor Sundquist, and walked right into a very, very controversial program. I did not know that the concept of School to Work was under attack. Education, unfortunately, in my opinion, has suffered a lot in this country, because of the battle that it has to be earmarked by either the Democratic or the Republican Party. And they're both as guilty of this nonsense, is what I call it.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. FEE: And School to Work was a Democratic program, and I'm an Independent, and it didn't make much sense. I didn't care what it was if it was good for the kids.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. FEE: But the Republicans thought it was business was going to take over education. And so suddenly I walk into this furor in Nashville. I don't know what hit me, because I'm suddenly being called by a senator from Chattanooga, Fowler, a communist. Now to tell a guy that's run a bomb factory for nine years that I am a communist --
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh gosh.
MR. FEE: And I'm sitting there thinking, "What did I walk into?" And this was sort of a country flow. This just wasn't Tennessee; there was a lady, a rabble-rouser in Philadelphia that was up there screaming about this was a program to put our kids to work, etc. And it wasn't; it was a -- and in fact there's so much little different between the Republican program of No Child Left Behind and School to Work; it's a name.
MR. MCDANIEL: Exactly.
MR. FEE: Both of them had a lot of similar concepts. But anyways, we got through that. Governor Sundquist remembers me well. I ran into him in a Charlotte airport not too long ago and we were reminiscing and he said, "Yeah," he said, "I didn't know what hit me when suddenly you're in my office and we're talking about communism." He said, "This guy's writing me these letters and" he said -- but anyways, it was a great experience, and Commissioner Walters was a wonderful lady to work for. Unfortunately, her dream was not recognized very well in that there's a lot of difference between the vocabulary and the desires. I take my hat off for the people who try to be in the Department of Education in today's world; they're underpaid, they're trapped by all kinds of bureaucratic regulations. I thought the Department of Energy had a lot of regulations; it's nothing compared to the State of Tennessee.
MR. MCDANIEL: Really?
MR. FEE: State of Tennessee has -- and I think we do it on purpose, I've had a lot of talks with commissioners of finance, we make it so hard to buy anything in Tennessee. We are proud of the fact that we balance our budget. Well, one of the reasons we balance the budget is I'm still waiting for a computer. The Commissioner wanted to get me a laptop; I haven't seen it yet. I mean it was always in the procurement cycle.
MR. MCDANIEL: Wow.
MR. FEE: Well, the bottom line is they didn't know how to give a computer to a guy that wasn't on the payroll officially.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. Sure.
MR. FEE: I was only there for $1.00 and they didn't know how to deal with $1.00. I never did even see the $1.00 in there.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right. Exactly.
MR. FEE: But it was a great experience. And since then, I've continued. Today, I am co-chair of the Public School Forum of East Tennessee over here in Knoxville. I'm still the chair, and we transitioned about two or three years ago from being worried a lot about K-12. We're instrumental in passing a lot of the reforms that Tennessee is now seeing. I'm proud of the fact that I was involved in those. And we moved on to helping pass the Complete College Act of 2010. And I have a contract, today, to figure out how to engage business into higher education. And tonight, in fact at 6:00, my wife and I are to be over at University of Tennessee; I'm on the Board of Visitors, have been for 18 years on the College of Arts and Science. Even though I was graduated engineering, because of that name, the Chinaman, Woy, who wasn't a Chinaman, his sister ultimately became the Dean of Arts and Sciences, and latched on to me to be on her Board of Advisors, and I'm still there. So, I'll spend the next two days at the University of Tennessee with the Board of Visitors.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. Mm-hmm.
MR. FEE: But in 1995, two years before I retired, our son had had a very successful career as a cruise director for Carnival Cruise Lines, fell in love, and decided he needed to get off the cruise ship, and he elected to start a business in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee in the theater business. He started The Comedy Barn in 1995, and needed somebody to do the books.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. FEE: So from 1995 till about five years ago, I did most of the payroll and the books for The Comedy Barn. He, ultimately, now has five theaters and two restaurants, and said I had to make a run to Pigeon Forge this morning to get some signatures for income tax time. And didn't know that when I talked to you and set this up. And so I do a lot of work in support of watching the books for him.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. FEE: And we're proud of his success. And we have four grandchildren up there. So, between education and that and then sometimes I squeeze in working on building an HO-scale circus and model railroad, I've got a couple of odd things on my resume of organizations I belong to.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. FEE: I belong to Circus Fans of America, and go to their national convention. I belong to the Society for Preservation of the American Carnival. I belong to the Circus Historical Society, and I belong to the Circus Model Builders. And I've got a full-scale HO circus downstairs.
MR. MCDANIEL: How long did it take you to do that?
MR. FEE: Seventeen years.
MR. MCDANIEL: Just 17 years, right. Well, you're still working on it, right?
MR. FEE: Oh, it's nowhere near finished. No. I get spurts. And last month I've added the living quarters for them; I've been buying and building trailers in there, so.
MR. MCDANIEL: Well, you're, you know, you're relatively young and healthy, so you've got a long way to go, don't you?
MR. FEE: I hope. I don't know about that young piece in there, but as you know also, the other piece has been working on the history of the sites of Oak Ridge with Bill Wilcox and D. Ray Smith, and still allowing Bill to be the mentor and friend. I guess he's my best friend by far in Oak Ridge.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. Sure.
MR. FEE: Well, anywhere. And we get together and worry about the history and what we can do to preserve it and maybe attract a few of those tourists from Pigeon Forge to stop off here.
MR. MCDANIEL: Exactly. Exactly. All right, Gordon. Thank you so much. This was a wonderful interview and it was great to hear about Oak Ridge from your perspective.
MR. FEE: Well, it's always fun to talk about things. And even though it was a lot of very stressful at times, there are just so many great stories in Oak Ridge that don't get told, and there are so many great people are in jobs that they can't talk about. And I think one of the greatest untold stories of Oak Ridge is what Oak Ridge has given beyond bombs to society. We just do a very poor job, in my opinion, of getting the story out. The fact that nuclear medicine was invented here, and now a third of us, in one time or another in our lives, will have nuclear isotopes put in us for medical reasons, and it all started here.
MR. MCDANIEL: Mm-hmm. Sure.
MR. FEE: Those kinds of stories need to get out.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. FEE: So I'm glad you do what you do.
MR. MCDANIEL: Well thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Gordon.
[END OF INTERVIEW]

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ORAL HISTORY OF GORDON FEE
Interviewed by Keith McDaniel
April 29, 2012
MR. MCDANIEL: This is Keith McDaniel, and today is April 19, 2012, and I am at the home of Mr. Gordon Fee. Gordon, thanks for taking the time to talk to us.
MR. FEE: Glad to do it.
MR. MCDANIEL: Let's start at the very beginning. Why don't you tell me where you were born and raised and something about your family and where you went to school?
MR. FEE: Okay. That's a pretty simple question. I was born in New York State, but we only stayed there for a very short period of time and went back to my father's hometown of Canonsburg, Pennsylvania. My wife always laughs when I say it's the home of Perry Como, Bobby Vinton, and me, down there. But I grew up and spent most of my life in that small town, about 17 miles to the west of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. And my father was in the newspaper business for a number of years, until World War II came along, and he was called up, or volunteered; I guess, to be truthful, he volunteered to go to World War II. And we stayed home while he went to Germany and fought in that war. And then afterwards he returns to Canonsburg. I did all of my schooling there, graduated from Canonsburg High School in 1952. And my physics teacher at that time said there was only one career that I should consider and only one school that I should consider, so I became a physics major at Penn State. And I went off in 1952 and ultimately graduated with a BS in physics from Penn State in 1956.
MR. MCDANIEL: Now how old was your father when he went in the war?
MR. FEE: My father was born in '09 and he went in in '41, so --
MR. MCDANIEL: He was 32.
MR. FEE: Thirty-two years old at that time.
MR. MCDANIEL : And they were taking those fellows then, weren't they?
MR. FEE: Yeah, and he was -- he had never graduated from high school, but he was certainly a leader and was identified very early on, sent to officer's training school, and ultimately only stayed out of the military about three years after the war, was called back up for Korea, and stayed in.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, did he?
MR. FEE: So I became an Army brat and was lucky enough to move around the countryside, as they did, from one military post to another, whether it be Fort Belvoir, Virginia, where I spent some of my time between college, or Europe; I got to go to Germany, because I was going home for the summer for my freshman and sophomore year in college. So my dream at Penn State was to my follow my father's footsteps and become a military officer and go into the military for good, and in my senior year at Penn State I was to be commissioned. I was the cadet commander at Penn State, led all of the ROTC troops there, and was given a regular Army commission with one exception, because I was going to be regular Army I had to take one more physical, and lo and behold, I failed it.
MR. MCDANIEL: You did?
MR. FEE: And they had taken us off on a Saturday morning to Carlisle, Pennsylvania, a big military hospital. And just before noon on that day they announced that we were running late and the cardiologist had a tee time at 1:00, and so we're going to double-time you to the heart doctor. In which they did, and he took one listen and said, "You have a murmur. You're out." And literally in 30 seconds my career went up in smoke.
MR. MCDANIEL: Wow.
MR. FEE: And I became suddenly eligible for the draft in 1956 in there, but it was too late to change over to even get a cap and gown, so I graduated in uniform, but was never commissioned.
MR. MCDANIEL: Never commissioned.
MR. FEE: And suddenly I had no job, and I went out and --
MR. MCDANIEL: And this is what, '56?
MR. FEE: 1956. And I began interviewing as a junior physicist, and accepted a job. I was in love and had been lucky enough at that time with my current wife, became my fiancé, and we were engaged. And she, frankly, thought this was a pretty good thing, because she was not looking forward to being a military wife at all.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. FEE: And so we accepted a job to go to work for Pittsburgh Plate Glass in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, her hometown.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh. Did you meet her at Penn State?
MR. FEE: Met her as Penn State as a blind date, and we were married at Penn State in the Eisenhower Chapel, because Milton Eisenhower, Ike's brother, was President of Penn State when we were there, and they named the chapel for him. And we were married -- we were the second marriage at the chapel at Penn State. But suddenly we have no job, but we find one very quickly and we're all set to go to Pittsburgh, when I see on this bulletin board that they were asking folks to come and interview in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. I'd never been out of the state of Pennsylvania going south, and I thought, "I don't have anything to do that particular week. Let's go to Tennessee" and I did. And as you and I said before we turned on the camera, it was kind of interesting because it was April 19, 1956 that I was here for an interview and met and became lifetime friends, I guess you might say, with my mentor and friend in Bill Wilcox.
MR. MCDANIEL: Wow.
MR. FEE: Bill was the Technical Director for the Gaseous Diffusion Plant. He worked for a Vice President by the name of Paul Vanstrum, and I was fortunate enough on that interview trip to not only interview with Bill Wilcox, but with the Vice President; went to lunch with Paul Vanstrum. And the two of them offered me a job at the end of that particular interview. There wasn't any discussion of going home; they said, "We'd like you to come to Tennessee." And I loved the place down here, so I can remember very distinctly getting off the airplane in State College, Pennsylvania, and Miriam met me and I was all aglow, saying, "Guess what; we're going to Tennessee," and her response was, "You are going where?"
MR. MCDANIEL: Because she was going home, wasn't she?
MR. FEE: She was going home to Pittsburgh.
MR. MCDANIEL: She was going home.
MR. FEE: But after some discussion, and we were not married at that time, we were only engaged, and her mother was not happy, her daddy was not happy, but we came down and looked. She brought her father along and looked. But I was sold.
MR. MCDANIEL: You were sold.
MR. FEE: Absolutely sold. And I think back on that interview, because Mr. Vanstrum reminded me of that interview for 40 years ago, because of one statement I made. And when I reflect back on it, I don't know why he hired me, because I must've been feeling pretty arrogant, because he asked me what was my career desire, and I said to take his job. And when I ultimately did become vice president and take his job he said, "Well, you finally made it, and here's the keys to the office" in there. But I was taken, and on July 7, 1956 came to work here in a program at that time where they hired you in at the K-25 site, but didn't assign you to any particular job; they rotated you for a year, six weeks at a crack, through each of a set of different departments. And that sort of set a real career path for me in that I look back at it now and I see what I really did for my career with -- which ultimately lasted some 40 hour -- 40 hours; 40 years or so.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right. Right.
MR. FEE: Was to move from one place to another and never stayed too long in any one particular assignment or one job.
MR. MCDANIEL: Now, why did they do that, the six weeks for a year? Was it just to see what you were good at or to see how you might fit into the --
MR. FEE: I think both; to make sure that they understood what your capabilities were, and that they could see how you might match up to their technical needs in there. So I started out in the world of barrier at K-25 on the midnight shift.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. Oh, is that right?
MR. FEE: And working in the pilot plant. And very quickly decided that I needed more schooling. And so in that era, the University of Tennessee ran a full-blown night school in Oak Ridge. In the yellow buildings there behind the Department of Energy headquarters today, they ran a night school where you could get a technical degree or a degree in management. I elected to start with an objective of getting a degree in, Master’s Degree in Nuclear Engineering. I figure if I'm in Oak Ridge, it's nuclear, I ought to get more knowledge in the area of nuclear engineering, and so I began going to night school. The first fall I was here, I wasn't quite married there; we were -- we married on December 15, 1956. So I had been to work here six months because Miriam's dad said we could not get married until we had $750.00 in the bank. Boy, when you think about that today --
MR. MCDANIEL: That was a lot of money, though, back in '56.
MR. FEE: That was a lot of money in that era. And so it took me that six months to get that amount of money. But yeah, they wanted to see what your capabilities were, and so as I said, I started out on the midnight shift, working in the barrier pilot plant, testing various new modes of barrier. Moved on to the Mechanical Engineering Department under a fellow by the name of Harold Culpepper, and began working on testing of compressors. As you know, in the Gaseous Diffusion Process you pump lots of gas around over and over and over again, and the more efficient the compressors are the better off your plant is going to be and the less electricity you're going to consume in doing that job.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. FEE: And so they gave me the job of constructing a major test facility for compressors and compressor blades. And we had to build the facility. And at that time all of that work was done for the Atomic Energy Commission, the predecessor of DOE. And they did all that work up at their research laboratory in Cleveland, Ohio. And lo and behold, along about, I guess it was 1958 -- my mind gets a little bit muddled on dates these days -- when Sputnik went up, and the next day they called out here and said to the K-25 managers that they no longer would do any work for other agencies; they were going deep into the space business quickly, come get the stuff.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, really?
MR. FEE: And so I was dispatched to Louis Field up in Cleveland, Ohio, was given a boxcar, literally a railroad boxcar, and we loaded as fast as we could all of the test equipment that they had been doing on compressors. And it wasn't called NASA in those days; it was a predecessor agency, and I've forgotten what it was.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. FEE: But we loaded everything up over a period of about ten days, didn't have time to match it to drawings, to anything, and brought it down into these big buildings at the diffusion plant, laid all that stuff out over the floor, and tried to match it to drawings, and what was this piece and that piece. But that ended up with establishing a real test facility for that particular entity. And I did that for about a year in there, before that job was stable enough. In the meantime, as I said, I was going to night school all the time, and ultimately graduated in 1962 at the University of Tennessee with a Master’s degree in nuclear engineering. Well, when you get a degree, you've obviously got to move on, and so I began looking for a job outside of Oak Ridge and looking around the countryside, but only interviewing on weekends, because I didn't want to jeopardize my job.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. FEE: But ultimately found a job that we thought we'd like, to move to San Diego, California and work for General Atomic in the reactor business. And when I announced to Mr. Wilcox that I was going to go, he said, "Let's talk to Vanstrum." And we did, and he said, "Well, I can see why you might feel that you want to move on." K-25 was laying off people in 1962, when I got my degree.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. FEE: And, but he said, "Let me see if I can find you a job with Union Carbide." All of us worked for Union Carbide’s Nuclear Division at that time.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. FEE: And they were headquartered in New York, and some Oak Ridgers had gone on to bigger jobs with Union Carbide, in particular an Associate Director of Oak Ridge National Laboratory by the name of Bob Sharpie, was a Vice President in the New York office, and they contacted him, and he said, "Well, I'm all booked up, but I'll do it on Saturday morning if he can be here at 7:00 in New York City," tomorrow morning.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh wow.
MR. FEE: And so I hustled; they got me a plane ticket, and next thing I knew, at 7:00 in the morning, I was in New York City at the Union Carbide headquarters building, talking to a guy that I had never heard of in my life.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. FEE: At 8:00 I accepted a job with him to go to work in Cleveland, Ohio, on a project having nothing to do with nuclear. And I guess it tells something about me, because if Bob Sharpie walked in here today and probably told me to go out and stand in the middle of the road out here, I'd probably go do it. He was a very charismatic type; went on to become Chairman of the Board and President of Bell & Howell.
MR. MCDANIEL: Wow.
MR. FEE: But he talked me into, based on the recommendation that he got from Oak Ridge, to going to Cleveland to be Engineering Manager for what is becoming somewhat popular today, and that's fuel cells.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right?
MR. FEE: Union Carbide at that time, 1962, held every patent of any substance for fuel cells.
MR. MCDANIEL: Now, how old were you when you accepted this? So that was '62?
MR. FEE: I was born in '34, and so --
MR. MCDANIEL: You were 28.
MR. FEE: Twenty-eight, right. I was 28 years old. And we go to Cleveland, and I can always remember having to do a little bit of arm-twisting. We had two small children by then, and I'm doing a little bit of arm-twisting because my wife was all convinced that, again, she'd been had, because --
MR. MCDANIEL: She'd been hoodwinked, hadn't she?
MR. FEE: -- she wanted to go to California and see what the life was on the beach in California, and here I am, trying to convince her that the beach in California was okay, but the one in Ohio on Lake Erie would be neat; we'd live right near the lake.
MR. MCDANIEL: Mm-hmm. Sure.
MR. FEE: So in May of 1962 we get to Cleveland, we decide our first weekend that she's there, "Let's go to the lake."
MR. MCDANIEL: Mm-hmm. In May.
MR. FEE: In May. And she said, "Well, the first thing I've got to do is find the snowsuits for the kids, because it is cold and blowy." We get to the lake and there are gigantic signs everywhere that the E. coli content is too high, stay off the beach.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh my goodness.
MR. FEE: And as a consequence, we were introduced to Cleveland in an interesting, interesting fashion there.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh my.
MR. FEE: But I became an Engineering Director, and Union Carbide at that time, as I said, held all the major patents for fuel cells, something that is coming back alive today. But at that time Union Carbide's only significant government operation was Oak Ridge, Tennessee or selling D-sized flashlight batteries to the U.S. Army. They did not believe in working for the U.S. Government.
MR. MCDANIEL: Really?
MR. FEE: And therefore, when they were approached by NASA, whatever the predecessor organization was, to undertake fuel cells for space, which has been the only real use of the fuel cell technology, they said no. They would release some of their patent technology to other people, but they were not interested in working for the government on space.
MR. MCDANIEL: Wow.
MR. FEE: They learned to regret that, because as the fuel cell world went, there was no commercial market. And they ultimately would've liked to have had some, but a little late. But Mr. Sharpie intervenes again in my life, because along about 1965, and I don't remember the exact year here, but along about October Mr. Sharpie shows up, and our boss at that time was another former associate director of Oak Ridge National Laboratory, by the name of Dr. Charlie Winters, headed up the fuel cell project for Union Carbide. And Sharpie showed up one day and called us all into the auditorium and they said, "We just signed a contract with General Motors. There's a big electric vehicle show in January for Congress on electric vehicles. General Motors has selected us to build a fuel cell hydrogen-powered truck to show at this show, and we have some, what, three months to do this. And it has to be 30 kilowatts," and about the biggest we had ever built was 300 watts.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. FEE: He called for other help to come up from Oak Ridge, because that's -- all the leaders were from there. And we go all out, 24 hours a day. General Motors did things, and this became, I didn't realize until two years ago, this was the first fuel cell-powered vehicle in the world.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. FEE: And General Motors did it really big-time; they pulled a brand new Chevy van, one of these box vans like you see florists using, off the line, and literally tore it down piece-by-piece and laid it out, and then rebuilt it back up with our power supply in it. And our power supply took up the entire back of the van; you couldn't haul another thing in it.
MR. MCDANIEL: I'm sure.
MR. FEE: With a hydrogen cylinder for hydrogen fuel and an oxygen cylinder, so you're driving down the road with hydrogen and oxygen.
MR. MCDANIEL: Best not wreck.
MR. FEE: We are ready on about January, early January to test it. We're all at the dynamometer in Detroit. And one of the things, that you have to have coolant, and the coolant was 550 gallons of potassium hydroxide, a chemical. And so they go down through the checklist, and they eventually roll in ten 55-gallon drums of potassium hydroxide, pour them in. Somebody along the line says, calls for power, and they call for five-percent power. And lo and behold, a wheel starts to turn on the back on the dynamometer. And then suddenly we see a little whiff of smoke out from underneath the vehicle. The next thing we know, we are all running, because there is liquid running out of the bottom of this vehicle. All 550 gallons come out on the floor. Subsequently, to find out that one of the drums wasn't potassium hydroxide; it was trichloroethylene, a solvent; it had dissolved all the plastic and the hydrogen-oxygen came together and we had a fire.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, gosh.
MR. FEE: And General Motors says, "Well, we're not going to make that show, but let's do it again." And so we do, but the second time around they didn't have a show for Congress, but they had a big show in Detroit and they drove this thing about here to the street, maybe 50 yards. The driver got out, threw the keys into the crowd, and they loaded it on an 18-wheeler, took it to six automobile shows around the country, stopped in Washington, D.C., donated it to the Smithsonian, where it is today, took a $6 million tax write-off, and said, "That's the end of fuel cells." And until this day, here we are, some zillion years later, and the technology just wasn't there; the physics wasn't there.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. FEE: So very shortly thereafter, on that episode, Union Carbide decided there was not any market for fuel cells, and we suddenly were on the market to close down the project and move on to other jobs. And here I am, looking for a job again. I ended up in another interesting career with Union Carbide at White Plains, New York. I became Marketing Manager for Union Carbide Environmental Instruments. And our number one instrument that we sold was a dissolved oxygen meter that was used in sewage treatment plants.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, really?
MR. FEE: So about as far from nuclear as you could possibly imagine.
MR. MCDANIEL: That's true.
MR. FEE: And I began traveling across the United States, touring sewage treatment plants. And there's nothing in your life more interesting than standing on top of a sewage treatment plant in the hot sun in July in Nashville, Tennessee, trying to figure out why your product doesn't work.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. FEE: But we developed that business over several years, from about 1969 to 1972, and got it in such a state that the business was attractive enough, it was sold, and was sold off to people that were in the instrument business. And so suddenly in 1972, after living three great years in White Plains, New York, we're back looking for a job. And Union Carbide offered us a job in Buffalo, New York. And it was October, and as we're leaving the driveway to go look for -- see whether my wife and family would like to live in Buffalo, we got about an hour away and she said, "I forgot to bring the boots for the kids." And I said, "If there's snow in October in Buffalo, New York, we ain't going there." So, well, we ended up wrapping the kids' feet in plastic, because there was snow.
MR. MCDANIEL: There was snow.
MR. FEE: And so coming back on the New York Turnpike on a Sunday night, I'm on the phone from one of the turnpike stands, talking to who else, but Bill Wilcox, saying, "What's the prospect of coming back to Oak Ridge?"
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. FEE: And he went and got on the phone with Mr. Vanstrum, and the next thing I know, we had a job offer to come back to Oak Ridge. So in 1972 we transferred back and have been here ever since.
MR. MCDANIEL: So you were gone, what, about ten years?
MR. FEE: About ten years.
MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah.
MR. FEE: And, of course, we came back working for Union Carbide, so all my company service kept in place there.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. Sure.
MR. FEE: My wife did not want to come back to Oak Ridge.
MR. MCDANIEL: Really?
MR. FEE: Couldn't get her out of here now, but her sort of thing was we'd done that gig. But once we came back and we were young then still and became very active in Oak Ridge Playhouse, and she did behind-the-scenes and I was on the stage, and we had kids growing up.
MR. MCDANIEL: What did you do at the Playhouse? What were some of the plays?
MR. FEE: I did -- well, I did, I guess my most famous role was in 12 Angry Men.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, really?
MR. FEE: I did that one. Did two Shakespeare shows. And I guess one of the leads was in a play called Indians. And it was a unique play in that we had three different Division Directors. By that time I had gone on to become a Division Director at ORNL. We had three different Division Directors playing Indians.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. FEE: And I played Sitting Bull, and you do a dance in that particular play where you put these steel hooks, simulated, through your chest and you dance around the Maypole, hung back on this thing in there. So had a lot of fun doing plays. And of course, you and I both know Paul Ebert. We became extremely good friends with Paul. All this occurred mostly before we left in '62.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right? Okay.
MR. FEE: So that when we come back we knew them, and they were one of the first people. In all fairness, Marguerite Ebert, we had a young boy, David, who was very, very shy, and we asked her to put him in a play. And he did go into a play with Marguerite.
MR. MCDANIEL: Because she was running the Junior Playhouse.
MR. FEE: She's running the Junior Playhouse.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. FEE: And he played a little rabbit or something in the first play. And during the course of the second play he was in for her, backstage there was a young magician, Mark Young from Oak Ridge here, and he began teaching our son magic. And that, for all, it seems funny now, but that became his profession.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. FEE: And he became a professional magician as a result of Oak Ridge Playhouse and Marguerite in there, and got started, and now is a very successful businessman in the entertainment field.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. FEE: So we come back to Oak Ridge in 1972, and we came back with the job that I was leading at that time, a highly, highly classified project that was designed to take centrifuges and separate plutonium. Since been declassified, but was highly classified at that time. We did all the secret passwords and all that good stuff.
MR. MCDANIEL: Now, where was that work being done?
MR. FEE: It was at K-25. We had to build a building, so I was the Project Manager, and built a building in the middle of the current K-25 building. The last building that is going to stand at K-25 is my building.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. FEE: K-1600 stands in the middle of the old U.
MR. MCDANIEL: In the middle of the old U.
MR. FEE: And we built that; today it's being used to test centrifuges for the plant up at Paducah, the one that's trying to go online right now. But we tried to hide the fact that it was a centrifuge building by moving it to a different area of the plant and putting windows in it. When you go out there next time, look at the building and you'll see all these windows in it.
MR. MCDANIEL: Really?
MR. FEE: Which are up at the top where there is no offices. And we were worried about satellites and all that good stuff.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, sure. Sure.
MR. FEE: But we were working a lot with E.I. DuPont people.
MR. MCDANIEL: Now let me ask you a question; the centrifuge technology in the early '70’s, was that -- I mean was that being developed, or had it already been developed at K-25?
MR. FEE: Just starting with development.
MR. MCDANIEL: Just starting, sure.
MR. FEE: But this is now '73.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right. Right.
MR. FEE: I think the centrifuge work, and we'd need Wilcox on this, but I think the centrifuge work starts about '68 at the University of Virginia. By the time we get into this business, it's relatively big machines, and so it had been matured a little bit in there. But all of the real work on the plant that was to be built would be at Savannah River, and so we worked a lot with E.I. DuPont people in there. And ultimately, even though it looked practical, whatever the mission was, which I never knew; we never knew what the product was going to be used for, it went away.
MR. MCDANIEL: Did it?
MR. FEE: And the project was terminated just a little bit after I was pulled out. I was pulled out, again, my career was sort of orchestrated by Vanstrum and Wilcox, and it became very obvious that the Reactor Division Director at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, a very famous Arrow gentleman, and one that I hope that somebody is talking to about Weinberg, just dawned on me, was a guy by the name of Beall. And his son is very famous because his son started Ruby Tuesdays, the restaurant.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right?
MR. FEE: And Sam Beall was division director, and he retired to help his son in the restaurant business.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right. Yeah, he's on my list. He's on my list for sure.
MR. FEE: Yeah, he's still alive; I've ran into him and he's --
MR. MCDANIEL: Does he live in Maryville?
MR. FEE: Yes.
MR. MCDANIEL: That's what I was thinking, he lives in Maryville.
MR. FEE: Yep, he lives in Maryville.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. FEE: And so he announced he was going to retire as Division Director of the Reactor Division, and I had diverse experience, and lucky enough, they told Herman Postma, the Director of the Laboratory, that I would be a good candidate. And so they put me over there to work for a year under Sam's tutorage and to run for the Laboratory all of the safety programs associated with reactor safety. In the '70s, '75 and on it was a very -- we were aggressively in this country addressing nuclear power, but there was still an awful lot of concern and public questioning about the safety of nuclear power.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. FEE: So I took on the challenge of coordinating and being the Project Manager for all of the programs at Oak Ridge National Laboratory that were being sponsored and paid for by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. So I would travel every two weeks to Washington to talk to the Nuclear Regulatory folks, and had interfaced with a lot of great scientists at ORNL who were working on the safety of the vessel that goes around it and on new fuel for reactors, etc. And then sort of as a sidelight, three of us went on the road, around the Southeast primarily, talking about the safety of nuclear power and why TVA’s plants would be safe. And one of the three of us was a gentleman by the name of Jack Gibbons, and Jack went on to become Science Coordinator for the United States for President Clinton, I believe.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right?
MR. FEE: And the other one was a gentleman I think you've probably run into, by the name of Bill Bibb, who worked for the Atomic Energy Commission, and we sort of came at it from different perspectives.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. FEE: And so after a year of being the Project Director for Nuclear Safety Programs, Sam Beall retires and I became the Division Director for the Reactor Division of Oak Ridge National Laboratory. So now I've worked at two of the plants, and under that just expanded my role and interest in the whole reactor field. But suddenly --
MR. MCDANIEL: And Union Carbide was still running the entire thing?
MR. FEE: Union Carbide is still running it, yep. This is late '70s now.
MR. MCDANIEL: Mm-hmm. Sure.
MR. FEE: And suddenly, you remember we started the '88, when we started standing in line for gas and we had the famous energy crisis and we couldn't burn lights at night?
MR. MCDANIEL: Yes. Sure.
MR. FEE: And the word came down from Washington, I'd love to know who in the history, that the Laboratory would no longer have a Reactor Division.
MR. MCDANIEL: Really?
MR. FEE: It was not popular and we needed to -- and so I was given the challenge of renaming the division. And so like it or not over there, I named it the Engineering Technology Division. And we had had another hiccup when it came to name in that timeframe; a famous congressman by the name of Holifield, somehow his colleagues wanted to honor him, and one midnight they renamed the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Holifield National Laboratory. And the Director, Herman Postma, went berserk, as we all did, and it took about six weeks or six months, I don't remember, it may have been six months, to get the name changed back and to name the accelerator out there the Holifield Accelerator. So, there were lots of name things going on.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. Sure. You know what would be valuable now, is some letterhead from the Holifield National Laboratory.
MR. FEE: It is. And the only two things that Herman would do under the name change was have letterheads printed up. And you're right, it would be very valuable. And they changed the sign. One sign he would -- had to agree to change the sign on the highway.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. FEE: But everything else, scientific papers, you -- I challenge anybody to find a scientific paper that says "Holifield" on it, because it was Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and he felt very strongly. But I spent several great years at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, but the actual division itself was located at Y-12, because long, long before my time Oak Ridge National Laboratory ran out of space. And so for years they had three of their major divisions were located at the Y-12 site, away from the main laboratory. And we had Engineering Technology, Fusion Energy, and Biology. And so in that role, I became very knowledgeable of a number of the Y-12 folks, because they did all of our maintenance and support activities, because we were on their real estate.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. FEE: And so it seems like that in all my career shifts around, I would be called into the boss's office and said, "Gee, we think you ought to go here or there. Do you think you could be there?" And when I went to the Reactor Division I had -- I was working, as I said, in another job. And the fact is, I jumped over a job. Gosh, that's funny, because I was thinking about it earlier this morning; I jumped over a job; they pulled me out of the Reactor Division to head up a thing called the Operating Contractors Project Office. The Operating Contractor's Project Office was put in place in about 1978 by Vanstrum to support the country's decision to build a major new diffusion plant -- not a diffusion plant; a new enrichment plant at Portsmouth, Ohio, using centrifuge technology.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. FEE: And there were going to be three major contractors involved in that; Goodyear, who was scheduled to ultimately run the plant; Union Carbide, who was going to do all of the development work here at Oak Ridge; and Air Research, who was going to do a lot of the basic production centrifuge work in California. And the Department of Energy, a fellow by the name of Percy Brewington, happens to live one block down from here right now, asked Union Carbide to establish an office staffed with people from all three different contractors, who would help the government engineer and get contracts to build that plan up in Portsmouth, which was scheduled to be a $2 billion investment. And so I was asked to head that up, and I had three Vice Presidents, one from Union Carbide, and one from Air Research, and one from Goodyear Atomic up in Akron. And so we went to work, essentially, as an arm of the Atomic Energy Commission, by that time, I believe, were ERDA, the Energy Research and Development Administration.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. FEE: And we were located at K-25 for a while. We were located at Y-12 for a while. Whoever happened to have a building available, it seemed.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. FEE: And then Jimmy Carter became President, and one of the very first things he does was cancel that project. So, I've got a long history of starting things, and they seem to come and go in there.
MR. MCDANIEL: They got canceled.
MR. FEE: But I was already gone when he canceled that, because one Friday night I got called into Mr. Vanstrum's office, and he said that his boss, which was Roger Hibbs, and he had talked, and they thought I needed to go to the Laboratory to be head of the Nuclear Regulatory Projects, and ultimately become Division Director. Why don't I go over there Monday morning and start to work? And don't worry about my office; they'd send my stuff over. And that was sort of my history with those guys, was "Don't worry about your office. We'll get it over there."
MR. MCDANIEL: "We'll get it to you."
MR. FEE: So, the next Monday I went over, walked into Sam Beall's office, and became Reactor Division Director, ultimately a year later in there. And the same thing -- what got me to remember that was basically the same thing happened in 1982. In 1982, I got called to Mr. Vanstrum's office and he said, "We know that in a year Jack Case is going to retire as Plant Manager of the Y-12 plant. You're our pick if you can learn to live in the weapons business, because it's a family. So, we want you to come over Monday." This was Friday night again.
MR. MCDANIEL: Of course.
MR. FEE: Always Friday night. "But I want you to think about it, because this is a serious -- if you can't make the grade it may be a serious hiccup."
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. FEE: And so that Friday night, I spent in the backyard of Bill Wilcox’s, sitting on his swing, talking about this career opportunity. I knew I wasn't going to turn him down. I mean, I wasn't going to turn my boss down if he wanted me to go do it. But that Monday morning, I went to work and suddenly was in the middle of the -- they moved me to Y-12 as head of -- I don't think it was called a division; I think we were the Department of Project Engineering. And had a lot of long-term Y-12ers who didn't think too much of a guy that came from Oak Ridge National Laboratory. You know, the production folks and the research folks never quite see eye-to-eye on things.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. Exactly.
MR. FEE: And so, here comes this invader in there. It had not been announced and wouldn't be announced for some time that I --
MR. MCDANIEL: Let me stop you for a second. You said you went over to Wilcox's house and sat -- what did Bill tell you?
MR. FEE: Bill told me, “Do what your heart says. Don't listen to anybody else, but you.” And he said, "You know how well you're thought of, but you've got to make your own career decisions there." That's what he told me.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. Sure.
MR. FEE: And which, he'd told me every other time also.
MR. MCDANIEL: But he -- but you'd known him for a long time, and he had a lot of confidence in your ability to do that.
MR. FEE: And I guess he sort of became -- well, he has been for 50 years, been my mentor. And it's sort of such an interesting thing. Bill, as you and I both know him very well, and you know how precise he is.
MR. MCDANIEL: Mm-hmm.
MR. FEE: And I guess I'd be amiss if I didn't tell my first Wilcox story, because --
MR. MCDANIEL: I was going to ask you about that. Tell me that, please.
MR. FEE: We come to work here on July 7, 19__. I say "we," because I was put into a room and locked up because I didn't have a clearance.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. FEE: And so, they literally locked you in a room. And my roommate for six weeks at work was a fellow by the name of Ed Woy. Ed's deceased now, but he also didn't have a clearance. I didn't know him, he didn't know me, but the rumor goes over the plant that there are two Chinamen up in the ad building; Woy and Fee are locked in there. And they gave us a job, we didn't have any clearance, of they brought in -- Mr. Wilcox brought in a zillion tubes about this long, about that round, that had been in tests in cooling towers, to see if they were corroding or not. And our job was to take a brush, ram it through there, collect all the stuff in a little bottle, put the bottle on a scale, and weigh it and plot the data. And so, we worked for two or three weeks doing this, eight hours a day.
MR. MCDANIEL: Wow.
MR. FEE: Plot.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. FEE: And of course, we wanted to be neat, you know? So, we plot all these things. And we probably plotted 60-70 of these graphs. Not allowed to know what they are, so it's weight versus sample number, or something of this like. And anytime you wanted to go to the restroom, you go to the door and knock on the door, and wave at the secretary and she would escort you down.
MR. MCDANIEL: Wow.
MR. FEE: And Mr. Wilcox would come over twice a day and check on the progress, and see how you're doing. And it ultimately comes time to deliver the graphs, and we're all proud. And to this day I can see it; we lay the graphs down, he picks up the first one and he says, "What a bunch of crap!" He says, "Don't you Yankee boys know anything about plotting graphs?" Well first, Mr. Woy wasn't a Yankee; he was from Virginia and South Carolina and Tennessee. And secondly, we didn't know what he was talking about.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. FEE: And we're shocked, and he says, "You know, you never, ever use the margin. The margin is not -- it's where you bind the thing. You put your line inside the thing. Do them over." And I told Bill that in the hospital here about six weeks ago, and he says, "You won't forget that story, will you?" and I said, "No, I won't." Because Bill was so precise, and you know, always he had his red pen. You'd give him a paper and you'd sweat because you knew it was going to come back with every -- and although we tell it sort of as a funny story now, in reality, I told my grandson, and I told Bill this sitting there in the hospital with him, it set a tone that I probably have lived with, that you're going to do it, you do it right, and you do it to the best of your ability, and if it isn't right you fix it. But you don't take shortcuts on things. And now today, it seems -- I still have a terribly difficult time when Bill, as he did just two days ago, he sends me these ballyhoos that we're working on for the history, and he says, "Mark them up." I have a hard time marking up Bill Wilcox's stuff; I really do.
MR. MCDANIEL: I'm sure.
MR. FEE: Anyway, to go on, I come back to Y-12 as a department head, and began going to Albuquerque, because in that era, 1982, the weapons business was fully run and coordinated by the Department of Energy's office in Albuquerque, New Mexico. And Oak Ridge had very, very little to do with the weapons business. They did some of the housekeeping with the contract. And I can remember they used to have, every quarter all the plant managers, and there were seven from around the countryside, of different parts of the weapons component, would be called, and we'd have a plant managers meeting in Albuquerque or at one of the plants. And the first one I went to with Mr. Case was in Albuquerque, and a gentleman named Herb Roser had the head job for Albuquerque for the Department of Energy. And we met with him before going into the big meeting, and I can remember him giving a lecture to us about the fact that I was coming into a weapons family and that he operated the business as a family; there was no differentiation between the government workers and the contractors, our job was to make sure the country had the right nuclear weapon defense systems in place and that we worked together to make that happen and to expend the taxpayers' money in the most efficient way possible. I think of that lecture a lot, and the fact is D. Ray Smith picked up that name from doing this thing like you're doing here at the Y-12 plant. And I told him that story on there, and that series that he's running for PBS now, he's called The Nuclear Family in there.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh yeah. Sure.
MR. FEE: And that's where he got the name, he told me, in there. So I spent a year trying to learn the business. The Y-12 is a fascinating place. If you can't get things done anywhere else in the world, you probably can get it done at Y-12. And they have such a wonderful attitude of, "We can do it no matter what it is." Sometimes my -- the people that worked, ultimately worked for me would tell me, "We can do it, just don't ask us how much it's going to cost."
MC. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. FEE: But learned from one of the great masters; Jack Case is obviously one of the foundations of the Oak Ridge complex. He was the guy that went to Los Alamos and brought the first drawings back to make the first parts that Y-12, when we converted over from being a separation plant to a machining plant.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. FEE: Proud of his heritage, that he was a machinist and carried a union card till the time he died, and really believed in the worker. And I guess that's the big lesson I learned from Jack Case, was that you're nothing without the people that work for you. And the guy -- Jack went out of his way when he retired to thank the janitor who cleaned his office.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. FEE: As well as thanking the people who were in management. But he specific -- I never forgot that; we were all out at the Elks Club for his retirement party, and he called that guy up and shook his hand and said, "You were the most important part of my office at times."
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. FEE: And that was just sort of Jack's way. So he was my mentor, you might say. Wilcox was the technical director, so I got the technical side from Bill, and the plant operations side from Jack Case. So it was a great year, and Jack retired then in '82-'83, and I became plant manager and had a great run of nine years through a pretty interesting time. In the front end of that period at Y-12 we were in a period of full-born production. We were fighting the Cold War by building the nuclear stockpile. President Reagan obviously believed in that as a deterrent. Nobody in the plant ever believed we wanted to use one of these things, but we sure had a work ethic of getting the job done. Had some wonderful people: Jeff Bostock, George Evans, Bill Thompson; lots of great people that worked in that era. And Joe LaGrone comes to town and becomes the head of the Department of Energy. And in a lot of aspects Joe put his mark in more than one way on the plant, because some funny things began happening across the world. One of the things that happened, a very sad event, when we lost a lot of our Marines in a bombing in Beirut.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. FEE: And as those, the violence picked up across the country and the terrorist threat became real, one of the first persons in this country, I believe, that ever, ever began to pay attention to it was Joe LaGrone. And he began coming out and looking and studying with us and talking about the fact that we had some vulnerabilities; that we were the stockpile for all the United States in rich uranium, and everything that was not in weapons is stored in Y-12, and therefore we might well be a target. And I had a head of security then by the name of George Evans who had grown up with the Y-12 facility, and George and I and a fellow by the name of B.B. Hopkins and Joe LaGrone would meet almost it seemed like every two or three days, sometimes in Joe's office, but more than likely he would show up at our office and say, "Let's look at this" or "Let's look at the vulnerability." And one of the first things that Joe decided, that the road beside the plant was a vulnerability from a security standpoint and it needed to be closed, and by god, we want it closed by tomorrow morning. And this happened to be Thanksgiving Eve.
MR. MCDANIEL: Now this was the Y-12 plant?
MR. FEE: This is Y-12.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right. Right. Okay.
MR. FEE: This is Y-12. I wish I could remember the era; D. Ray can, but I can't. This was about '83-'84. And all I remember, it was Christmas Eve. I mean --
MR. MCDANIEL: Thanksgiving.
MR. FEE: -- Thanksgiving Eve.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. FEE: And we had to figure out a way to close a road and put signage on it as a minimum.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. Sure.
MR. FEE: 'Cause people were using it to go up, back and forth, go to the lake or whatever. It was a thoroughfare through the reservation
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. FEE: And so -- but you never gave George Evans and B.B. Hopkins a job that they said, "You want it closed, boss? It'll be closed." And we had one sign painter, and we called him in. He had already gone home.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. FEE: We called him in and laid it out and he says, "There's no way in the world, you guys. I mean I can't get this all done." "Well, you know anybody that does?" "Not in the plant," he says, "but I've got a little business on the side, and my son does." "Where's your son?" He says, "He's playing softball for the high school over there. He's a senior in high school, but he's a great painter." We sent a guard car out to the ballpark, stopped the game, got this kid off.
MR. MCDANIEL: It probably scared him to death, didn't it?
MR. FEE: Mr. Evans put his hand on his shoulder or something and said, "Remember, you can't see anything and do anything," and we didn't take him into any classified areas; we took him into the paint shop.
MR. MCDANIEL: Of course.
MR. FEE: And the two of them painted signs, and George and I sat around and he came up with the idea, "How are we going to block this road in there? We can't just put up barriers," because the idea was to make this a secure road. I don't know how George thought about it, but he came up with the idea of taking Dempster Dumpsters and putting them full of sand.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. FEE: So we rolled Rogers out on Thanksgiving Eve to the quarry and we bought a zillion dump trucks with sand and filled them up in Dempster Dumpsters and put them on Bear Creek Road. And a fisherman showed up at 5:30, the first guy we stopped was a fisherman pulling his boat, mumbling like mad that he was going to miss the daylight coming, why were we, you know, what are we doing, you know, closing the road. But the road closed. About three weeks later the Secret Service came down from Washington to see this great idea, and the first place that they had got the assignment of stopping the traffic around the White House, and they went back, and the first thing they did was put up Dempster Dumpsters along one side of the White House, but they only kept them for a week.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. Sure.
MR. FEE: We kept them for about two months. And so the security buildup, that was one of the first big changes. So we got lots of production going on, we're going belly-out on production. Suddenly there's a threat. But again, it's only Joe that is really recognizing this. And we went on to worry about needing more guard towers and roads closed and trees cut down and internal security beefed up. But we were always about six months ahead of what was happening in Washington, and I tip my hat, that was Joe.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. FEE: And yeah, he had the name "Nervous Joe" in the agency.
MR. MCDANIEL: Did he? Mm-hmm.
MR. FEE: In there. Somewhere in that early '80 period another event that changed the whole face of the world occurs, the world as I know it at Y-12, and that was a scientist doing work out of Oak Ridge National Laboratory, published a research paper in Virginia somewhere on the mercury contamination. Mercury had been used in the Y-12 facility in the 1960s, early '60s, as a media to carry lithium, because one of the ingredients needed for a nuclear weapon, an advanced nuclear weapon, was a lithium isotope, and it had to be separated. So two gigantic buildings were built at Y-12 and filled with miles and miles and miles of piping and pumps and condensers full of mercury that were used to separate lithium. And in that era nobody knew that mercury was a -- or could be a bad actor, because all of us, if you're older than 30 or 40 years old, all your early teeth are full of mercury.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. FEE: Because instead of gold they used mercury to fill your teeth. And so everybody thought you're using it in there, so when they filled the plant, and the way they filled the plant with mercury was to build a big pig trough on top of the hill overlooking the plant down in the valley, and put a pipe down into the building. And they brought in from across the world mercury in flasks, because the only real use for mercury prior to this had been as ballasts in sea ships. And so you would have a 76, I think it is -- 71, 76 pounds, 76 pound or 76 kilogram flask, looking like one of the old canteens the military had, full of mercury, and they would use those on sailing ships down in the bottom as ballasts. And the United States brought together all this mercury to put into this plant, and they got it from the equivalent of Fort Knox, it was West Point, where the United States stored all its silver.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. FEE: And they brought it all in, and so just like the silver store, we suddenly had mercury. And they would just empty them, stand out in the open. And they thought it was funny when down in these buildings, when they got full, mercury come out of the roof. And so there was mercury -- and these tales I didn't see; Wilcox did.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. Right.
MR. FEE: Wilcox was there. But nobody worried. There wasn't any problem. It wasn't until much, much later that the Japanese discovered that mercury, which also had been used as thermometers or it had some use in electric power plants, had got into the Bay of Japan, and that as it is in the Bay it converts itself into a much more dangerous form of mercury, that the fish were eating and then ultimately dying. So you had to go from the elemental mercury, though, to a long process of converting it to another form of mercury that is then digested by fish.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. FEE: And so suddenly we are suddenly on the spotlight, though, of some of this mercury having got into the creek that goes down through Oak Ridge and ultimately out into the lake. And the whole environmental world is suddenly upon us. And there were hearings held down at the American Museum of science and Energy and there was a lot of money put into studies, and again, another name, Bill Wilcox was assigned the task of documenting all of the mercury uses in the plant to identify how much might've got away. And the very big cleanup began and we built a new retaining pond at the end of the plant. And so we're now in the mid -- beginning the mid to second half of the '80s, and so we've got a security thrust going on, an environmental cleanup beginning, and weapons begins to tailor down. The Cold War, the Wall comes down in there, and suddenly we are going from being a production to weapons coming back. Because one of the facts that not too many people understand is that in the 1960s President Eisenhower edict by an executive order that only so much of the country's enriched uranium would be used for weapons, and therefore if in fact the military comes up with a need for a new bomb, a new torpedo in there, the only way they could get one is give you back one of the old ones, and you take them all apart.
MR. MCDANIEL: I see.
MR. FEE: So Y-12 is both a production facility and a recycle facility.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, okay.
MR. FEE: When parts come back from the military they go to Amarillo, Texas, the bomb is taken apart, all the uranium parts come back to the Y-12 facility, they're melted down and reshaped and reformed, and sent back out as something else, if there is a need.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, okay.
MR. FEE: Now they come back and are put into -- the uranium is put into storage.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. FEE: And so we began converting the plant from being a production full out to much more of a recycle and storage mode as the '80s came on. And a lot of the emphasis went off then into looking at what needed to be to clean the mercury residual and any other thing that might have contaminated the facility in there. And here today, just recently the whole mercury story has began to blossom again, because each year the standards of what people think you need seem to be constantly being taken down, and what may have been acceptable ten years ago is not acceptable today in there.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. FEE: But it was a wonderful time at Y-12. In the middle of the '80s, 1986, as a result of the great work that had been done by the engineering staff, Y-12 was one of the leaders -- one of the leaders in the country of computer-aided manufacturing. And through the leadership of a guy named Mike Cuddy the plant entered and won an award from the Society of Manufacturing Engineers in 1986 as being the leading computer-aided manufacturing entity in the country. And we all got to go to Detroit to a big black tie dinner and the plant was honored. One of the few times that Y-12 was very visible, because most of the work is classified.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. FEE: It's not classified that they make parts for nuclear weapons, but exactly how they do it is the classified entity. During that era also, as the weapons business began to tailor off, or the country found itself in the need of doing things that nobody else could do, Y-12 inherited a few famous jobs, you might say.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. FEE: Before my time as plant manager probably the most famous of the Y-12 stories was they inherited the job of making the boxes that went to the moon to haul the rocks back. And they also, as a result of making those, engaged with a number of the astronauts that went to the moon. And one of the great stories is that over lunch one day one of the astronauts talked to Bill Thompson and said, "You think you could make me a special head? You're making this tool called the multipurpose tool," he said, "I have a special need tool that I want you to make for me, but there's no drawings in there." Ultimately what they made was a golf head.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. FEE: And the golf ball they hit on the moon, the head was made at Y-12, and it was designed on a napkin, according to Bill Thompson. That's a rumor story, 'cause I wasn't there.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. FEE: But I was there when we were contacted by the U.S. Navy and they were not having very good success at getting any commercial vendors to be able to make the propulsor that goes on the Sea Wolf submarine, the big, gigantic submarines that are the quietest in the world now.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. FEE: And they had the design, but they could not figure out anybody that could really make it in there. And they said, "Could you show us -- demonstrate whether or not you might have some capability in this area?" and a little test was designed. All the Navy tests for that kind of a propulsor, which is really just a big series of blades that go around, all the original prototype work and experimental work is done at Penn State University in a water tunnel on models, small models of what they need. And so they tested a particular configuration at Penn State. They took the data from that test, the Navy took it down to David Taylor Research Basin in Maryland. They modified it and looked at it, what they want, and they sent it down on a satellite over -- and this is era in the '80s, so this is pretty fancy stuff for that era.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. FEE: And they gave us the design on a Friday, and on Monday we gave them a plastic model that we had grown over the weekend out of an advanced technology where you can simulate metal shapes using a mold. And they were so convinced at the can-do attitude that the plant demonstrated, they gave us the job of making this propulsor, which was so big it was shipped out of here on a barge and went up around the -- and up to Norfolk, I guess, ultimately, and was the first Sea Wolf. And then we had to teach somebody how to do it in the private sector, because we don't compete with the private sector. But those are two of the most famous jobs I think that Y-12 has undertaken in there. So all that time was just a fabulous time because of the work ethic of the people. I mean we had 5,000 people in that era, and nobody could talk about what they really did to their families. Even to this day my son would tell you he hasn't the foggiest notion what his dad did in there.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. FEE: And so along about '92, actually it was nine years, so it's '83 to '92, I guess, running at Y-12, Herman Postma announced his retirement as executive vice president. And Clyde Hopkins was the president of the -- by that time we are now Lockheed Martin, because in 1982, the week before the World's Fair opened in Knoxville, Tennessee, we all remember that, because Union Carbide once a year would hold a dinner for us, and the president of Union Carbide and his few honchos from New York office would come down and tell us all about the wonderful world in chemicals and how great Union Carbide was. And we were all at Club Laconte the week before the World's Fair opens, in I guess April of '82.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. FEE: And just about the time the Goodyear blimp floats by the window, rehearsing for opening day of the World's Fair, the Union Carbide president comes up and says, "You guys aren't going to be interested in hearing anything about Union Carbide, because we met today on an airplane in Louisville, Kentucky, of all places, and advised the Atomic Energy Commission," or DOE, whoever we are in that era, "that we no longer want to be running any facility at Oak Ridge. We're out."
MR. MCDANIEL: Wow.
MR. FEE: And there was a silence in the room and we all said, "Oh my god, we're going to be working for Goodyear." This is -- a sign has come by, because they had Goodyear Atomic, and they ran the Portsmouth plant.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right. Right.
MR. FEE: And so we thought, "Oh my." Well, that started a very interesting period in our lives, because it takes from '82 to '84 to bid the contract and Union Carbide leaves. And ultimately the Department of Energy made a decision that everybody would be transferred to the new contractor; the bulk would go, and only 27 key managers would be up for grabs, and I was one of the key managers up for grabs, as was Clyde Hopkins and others.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. FEE: And another historical piece that we loved to get our hands around is there were many, many buttons made that said, "I'm the bulk."
MR. MCDANIEL: Really?
MR. FEE: And people wore those proudly, "I'm the bulk. I get to go and you guys, good luck in there."
MR. MCDANIEL: Good luck.
MR. FEE: So we were interviewed by all the bidders and got some nice trips. We got taken to San Diego and got courted by Air Research to their headquarters, etc. in there. And Martin Marietta courted us and took us to their laboratory, etc. And ultimately about half of us got jobs with Martin Marietta. They aren't Lockheed Martin then; they're Martin Marietta.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. FEE: And I went from being a plant manager for Union Carbide to a vice president plant manager for Martin Marietta in 1984 in there. And then in '88 or whenever they became Lockheed Martin, we all became Lockheed Martin until they ultimately decided they didn't want to bid.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. FEE: And so I become in '92 the executive vice president. At that time we had a contract for all three facilities, plus Paducah and Portsmouth, and the plant that used to be GE down at Pinellas, Clearwater, Florida, in there. It gets closed I believe sometime when I'm executive VP. Didn't have much to do with it in there. And then ultimately in '94 Clyde retired and I became president of Lockheed Martin Energy Systems. And at that time we still had all five facilities; the laboratory and Y-12, and the K-25 site had been dormant now since 1985, when it was shut down and put in cold storage, and we began the cleanup in about '90 in there. And so I became president and stayed there until April of 1997. And when I retired, it's been a long time ago now
MR. MCDANIEL: It has, hasn't it?
MR. FEE: It's been a long time ago. During my tenure as president the energy -- the fusion plants at Paducah and Portsmouth were spun off into a new private, semi-private, this -- I can't even think what they're called now, USEEC.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. FEE: Enrichment Corporation.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. Sure.
MR. FEE: That transition began. The laboratory was spun off as a separate entity. So that occurred about the last year that I was there, and it became its own little company, and it began this trend that ultimately was consummated then after I retired, and they rebid the job to break it into all these pieces of multiple contractors.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. Mm-hmm.
MR. FEE: So that's my story and I'm sticking to it.
MR. MCDANIEL: Well, that's a good story. That's a great story, MR.. So you retired in you said '97?
MR. FEE: I retired in April of 1997.
MR. MCDANIEL: '97.
MR. FEE: Right. So that's --
MR. MCDANIEL: For 40 years you were --
MR. FEE: Forty-one years.
MR. MCDANIEL: Forty-one years.
MR. FEE: Forty-one years, not quite 41.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. FEE: Yeah. And it was a great, great career and got to love Oak Ridge in there. So that's -- god, that's 15 year ago. Holy crow, that's -- yeah, it's April.
MR. MCDANIEL: Yep. Yep.
MR. FEE: Right now we're at April again of '12.
MR. MCDANIEL: Yep, April 15 years ago.
MR. FEE: It's 15 years ago. My wife would say I just changed careers, but I -- that's 15 years ago.
MR. MCDANIEL: Wow.
MR. FEE: In there.
MR. MCDANIEL: So what have you done since you retired? What do you do? You stay busy obviously.
MR. FEE: Well, yeah. During the course of my career at the plants, one of the sidelights that I ended up with beginning in 1992 -- in 1992 the president, which I guess is Clyde at that era, got a call asking for us to join the Tennessee Business Roundtable in Nashville, and I became the representative of that. And in 1994 we were just members of this organization. It's an organization of CEOs who worry about the policy of businesses from a government standpoint, a state government standpoint. And they -- I got a call from a fellow that ultimately went on to become the commissioner of finance for the State of Tennessee, Dave Goetz. He was the executive director of this thing called the Tennessee Business Roundtable, and he says to me, "Look, our education chair just retired" -- no, "just got reassigned by Tennessee Eastman to Brussels, so we can't use him anymore. Would you be my education chair for the roundtable? We'll meet once a year and we just really want to use your name." And I was dumb enough to say yes. Here we are some, what, good grief --
MR. MCDANIEL: Twenty years.
MR. FEE: That's 19 --
MR. MCDANIEL: What'd you say?
MR. FEE: That's '94. So --
MR. MCDANIEL: Eighteen years later.
MR. FEE: Here we are, 18 years later. I am still today the education chair of the Tennessee Business Roundtable. And the end of my career pretty much down there, but I have grown a passion for public education, because that's what it was all about.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. FEE: And the interaction between how business and public education, all the way from pre-K through higher education. And so I have spent hours on that endeavor, and so how does that play into the story? Well, it was announced in about December, right before Christmas of 1996, that I was going to retire.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. FEE: And because of that security buildup we were a little bit ahead of the power curve when it came to cell phones and telephones and all this, because Martin Marietta insisted that we all have radios in our company cars, and so we had radios. And so I'm driving down Interstate 40 and I get a call on the radio, which was pretty rare. I mean it was -- and it's the Commissioner of Education for the State of Tennessee, and she says, "No, you're not retiring. You're coming to work for me in there." And she, like other individuals -- I told you about Bob Sharpie and his charisma on me. Commissioner Jane Walters had about the same effect.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. FEE: And she said, "As soon as you retire I want you to come to Nashville, and we've got a federal grant for $28 million, and I think we could learn a lot from having businesspeople infused into the State Department of Education. Come to work for me." So for four years I commuted from here, sometimes three or four times a week, to Nashville, come home stupid enough to sleep here, and go back in the morning.
MR. MCDANIEL: Of course.
MR. FEE: My wife thought I was nuts. And I ran as one of the assistants in the State Department of Education as a $1.00 a year volunteer, probably the first and the last executive volunteer they ever had. And I worked for Commissioner Walter and Governor Sundquist, and walked right into a very, very controversial program. I did not know that the concept of School to Work was under attack. Education, unfortunately, in my opinion, has suffered a lot in this country, because of the battle that it has to be earmarked by either the Democratic or the Republican Party. And they're both as guilty of this nonsense, is what I call it.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. FEE: And School to Work was a Democratic program, and I'm an Independent, and it didn't make much sense. I didn't care what it was if it was good for the kids.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. FEE: But the Republicans thought it was business was going to take over education. And so suddenly I walk into this furor in Nashville. I don't know what hit me, because I'm suddenly being called by a senator from Chattanooga, Fowler, a communist. Now to tell a guy that's run a bomb factory for nine years that I am a communist --
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh gosh.
MR. FEE: And I'm sitting there thinking, "What did I walk into?" And this was sort of a country flow. This just wasn't Tennessee; there was a lady, a rabble-rouser in Philadelphia that was up there screaming about this was a program to put our kids to work, etc. And it wasn't; it was a -- and in fact there's so much little different between the Republican program of No Child Left Behind and School to Work; it's a name.
MR. MCDANIEL: Exactly.
MR. FEE: Both of them had a lot of similar concepts. But anyways, we got through that. Governor Sundquist remembers me well. I ran into him in a Charlotte airport not too long ago and we were reminiscing and he said, "Yeah," he said, "I didn't know what hit me when suddenly you're in my office and we're talking about communism." He said, "This guy's writing me these letters and" he said -- but anyways, it was a great experience, and Commissioner Walters was a wonderful lady to work for. Unfortunately, her dream was not recognized very well in that there's a lot of difference between the vocabulary and the desires. I take my hat off for the people who try to be in the Department of Education in today's world; they're underpaid, they're trapped by all kinds of bureaucratic regulations. I thought the Department of Energy had a lot of regulations; it's nothing compared to the State of Tennessee.
MR. MCDANIEL: Really?
MR. FEE: State of Tennessee has -- and I think we do it on purpose, I've had a lot of talks with commissioners of finance, we make it so hard to buy anything in Tennessee. We are proud of the fact that we balance our budget. Well, one of the reasons we balance the budget is I'm still waiting for a computer. The Commissioner wanted to get me a laptop; I haven't seen it yet. I mean it was always in the procurement cycle.
MR. MCDANIEL: Wow.
MR. FEE: Well, the bottom line is they didn't know how to give a computer to a guy that wasn't on the payroll officially.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. Sure.
MR. FEE: I was only there for $1.00 and they didn't know how to deal with $1.00. I never did even see the $1.00 in there.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right. Exactly.
MR. FEE: But it was a great experience. And since then, I've continued. Today, I am co-chair of the Public School Forum of East Tennessee over here in Knoxville. I'm still the chair, and we transitioned about two or three years ago from being worried a lot about K-12. We're instrumental in passing a lot of the reforms that Tennessee is now seeing. I'm proud of the fact that I was involved in those. And we moved on to helping pass the Complete College Act of 2010. And I have a contract, today, to figure out how to engage business into higher education. And tonight, in fact at 6:00, my wife and I are to be over at University of Tennessee; I'm on the Board of Visitors, have been for 18 years on the College of Arts and Science. Even though I was graduated engineering, because of that name, the Chinaman, Woy, who wasn't a Chinaman, his sister ultimately became the Dean of Arts and Sciences, and latched on to me to be on her Board of Advisors, and I'm still there. So, I'll spend the next two days at the University of Tennessee with the Board of Visitors.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. Mm-hmm.
MR. FEE: But in 1995, two years before I retired, our son had had a very successful career as a cruise director for Carnival Cruise Lines, fell in love, and decided he needed to get off the cruise ship, and he elected to start a business in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee in the theater business. He started The Comedy Barn in 1995, and needed somebody to do the books.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. FEE: So from 1995 till about five years ago, I did most of the payroll and the books for The Comedy Barn. He, ultimately, now has five theaters and two restaurants, and said I had to make a run to Pigeon Forge this morning to get some signatures for income tax time. And didn't know that when I talked to you and set this up. And so I do a lot of work in support of watching the books for him.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. FEE: And we're proud of his success. And we have four grandchildren up there. So, between education and that and then sometimes I squeeze in working on building an HO-scale circus and model railroad, I've got a couple of odd things on my resume of organizations I belong to.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. FEE: I belong to Circus Fans of America, and go to their national convention. I belong to the Society for Preservation of the American Carnival. I belong to the Circus Historical Society, and I belong to the Circus Model Builders. And I've got a full-scale HO circus downstairs.
MR. MCDANIEL: How long did it take you to do that?
MR. FEE: Seventeen years.
MR. MCDANIEL: Just 17 years, right. Well, you're still working on it, right?
MR. FEE: Oh, it's nowhere near finished. No. I get spurts. And last month I've added the living quarters for them; I've been buying and building trailers in there, so.
MR. MCDANIEL: Well, you're, you know, you're relatively young and healthy, so you've got a long way to go, don't you?
MR. FEE: I hope. I don't know about that young piece in there, but as you know also, the other piece has been working on the history of the sites of Oak Ridge with Bill Wilcox and D. Ray Smith, and still allowing Bill to be the mentor and friend. I guess he's my best friend by far in Oak Ridge.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. Sure.
MR. FEE: Well, anywhere. And we get together and worry about the history and what we can do to preserve it and maybe attract a few of those tourists from Pigeon Forge to stop off here.
MR. MCDANIEL: Exactly. Exactly. All right, Gordon. Thank you so much. This was a wonderful interview and it was great to hear about Oak Ridge from your perspective.
MR. FEE: Well, it's always fun to talk about things. And even though it was a lot of very stressful at times, there are just so many great stories in Oak Ridge that don't get told, and there are so many great people are in jobs that they can't talk about. And I think one of the greatest untold stories of Oak Ridge is what Oak Ridge has given beyond bombs to society. We just do a very poor job, in my opinion, of getting the story out. The fact that nuclear medicine was invented here, and now a third of us, in one time or another in our lives, will have nuclear isotopes put in us for medical reasons, and it all started here.
MR. MCDANIEL: Mm-hmm. Sure.
MR. FEE: Those kinds of stories need to get out.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. FEE: So I'm glad you do what you do.
MR. MCDANIEL: Well thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Gordon.
[END OF INTERVIEW]